TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "lists"
Kurt Cobain’s Handwritten Top 50 Albums List published in Journals
Filed under: lists
(Source: flavorwire.com, via zzzan)
Cynical Advice, 15” x 20”, Graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper,2012. For the 2012 BRIC benefit gala.
Barry Commoner Dies at 95 - NYTimes.com
He was called “the Paul Revere of Environmentalism.”
His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
That’s the second great Marxist we’ve lost this week at the age of 95. RIP.
Filed under: chalkboards, obituaries
? SMALL BUSINESS
Screenshot from Let There Be Light (YouTube) John Huston’s 1946 documentary about soldiers returning from World War II with PTSD. Paul Thomas Anderson claims it was a major influence on The Master — and admitted, “There’s stuff that we kind of ripped off, line for line, from that film.”
Alexander Calder’s address book, 1930 (via)
Filed under: lists, handwriting
How John Porcellino makes his comics
One of my favorite cartoonists, Mr. John Porcellino, has a trilogy of blog posts up about his process of making comics.
In part one and two he lays out his materials, and in part three he talks more about the process of actually creating the comics.
I was struck by how tight he tries to get the originals before he scans them into the computer — he fixes most of his inking mistakes pre-digital.
The other thing that has always fascinated me is how writing leads his process, and how much subtraction the stories go through:
I almost always draw my comics from a well-considered script. The script usually contains just text— descriptions, narration, and dialogue. Sometimes I’ll throw in little drawings, but it’s mostly just text. In the first draft I typically throw in everything that comes to mind, and the writing process for me is editing all that down into a more streamlined, rhythmic story. The vast majority of the time and energy I spend on an issue of King-Cat is on the writing part of it. Some stories come out just fine the first time around, but many need extensive revising and editing. The Perfect Example storyline, for instance, took ten years of work (off and on) before it felt ready for me to start drawing. That’s an extreme example, but it just goes to show you, you can’t force things. When it comes time to actually sit down and draw the comic it usually goes pretty quick, because the script is so precise.
So it follows that most of the comics come from his notebooks, which he uses to stage the material until it’s time to do a new issue of King-Cat:
Basically, I keep little notebooks around that I fill up with ideas: memories, turns of phrase, poems, lists, dialogue… Lists…help me keep track of how close I am to having enough material for a new issue, and they’re constantly being updated, edited, and reformulated.
It makes me think of David Shrigley, who says, “I usually write a list of things to draw – a big, long list. If I want to make 50 works there are 50 things to draw.”
If you think about it, a script is sort of just a list of things to make happen.
Related reading in the NYTimes this Sunday: “Our Longing For Lists”
(via Kevin H)
A bag of nouns
In my favorite writing book, What It Is, Lynda Barry explains how to make a “Word Bag”—a word bag is basically just a bunch of nouns that you write down and stuff in a bag and pull out randomly when you need to begin a piece of writing and you’re not sure where to start. (Here’s Lynda, taking you through the exercise.)
Turns out, this is pretty much how Ray Bradbury got started, too.
INTERVIEWER
In Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton. Do you still do this?
BRADBURY
Not as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.
Reading advice from Ray Bradbury in the May 1971 Wilson Library Bulletin (via)
John Baldessari’s list of “assignments” for his CalArts class, 1970
When Baldessari was first getting started, CalArts wasn’t much of a name yet, and it was kind of a hippie school without grades or a curriculum or much structure — Baldessari started teaching there before he became “one of the top conceptual artists in the world.” Here’s a video of him talking about his time teaching there, including recollecting “a class on joint-rolling.” Here are some of the assignments from his list:
1 - Imitate Baldessari in actions and speech.
10 - Create art from our procedures of learning. How does an infant learn?
16 - Given: $1. What art can you do for that amount?
17 - Cooking art. Invent recipes. They are organizations of parts, aren’t they?
23 - What are the minute differences in things that are supposed to be the same?
31 - Steal the trash from Pres. Corrigan’s wastebasket and make a collage of it.
43 - Forgeries. Ea. in class tries to forge my signature on a check by looking at an original. Or forgeries of forgeries of forgeries, etc.
46 - One person copies or makes up random captions. Another person takes photos. Match photos to captions.
68 - Make up a list by looking at art books, talking to artists on things to avoid in making art. Do them. Ask yourself if results are good or bad art.
85 - Describe the visual verbally and the verbal visually.
99 - Art that requires the rental of a Service rather than an Object.
More on Baldessari from the LATimes:
For anyone not wired to contemporary art, John Baldessari is a 58-year-old artist who grew up in the anonymous grubbiness of National City with expectations of going no further in life than teaching high school and making a bit of a local reputation as an artist. He pursued both dreams and wound up a figure of international reputation. Teaching—at CalArts instead of Chula Vista High—he evolved into a kind of guru. His influence, both direct and oblique, is downright astonishing. You can see his fingerprints on virtually every member of the younger generation who continues to dominate the high-risk lane of today’s art from Cindy Sherman to Robert Longo.
We think of artists as making their mark by adding something, something original. Baldessari has functioned by subtraction. Subtraction is not original in contemporary art; it comes from abstract Minimalism.
I became familiar with the list via Rob Walker’s review of Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment.
Filed under: John Baldessari
