AUSTIN KLEON

“Take Me With You When You Go” by Jack White from Blunderbuss...

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:11:00 -0500

“Take Me With You When You Go” by Jack White from Blunderbuss (2012) (via thisismyfavoritesong)

Filed under: my listening year 2012

thenearsightedmonkey: ‘What It Is’ class flag Filed under:...

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:06:48 -0500

thenearsightedmonkey:

‘What It Is’ class flag

Filed under: Lynda Barry

Philip K. Dick’s notes for Exegesis (from this NYTimes...

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:46:58 -0500

Philip K. Dick’s notes for Exegesis (from this NYTimes series)

Speaking of handwriting, holy moly, that fella could CLUSTER! (Anybody else read that Janet Burroway book in creativity writing class?)

Thanks, Peter!

One badass picture of Phil Collins by photographer Neale Haynes....

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:15:00 -0500

One badass picture of Phil Collins by photographer Neale Haynes. Not a bad article, either.

I wrote a little thing on my blog about how to improve your...

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:00:26 -0500

Maira Kalman

John Lennon

Phil Collins

Jimi Hendrix

Steve Brodner

Lynda Barry

I wrote a little thing on my blog about how to improve your handwriting. Here’s a little gallery of handwriting I’ve tried to rip off over the years…

The playable Moog synth and 4-track recorder on today’s...

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:25:06 -0500

The playable Moog synth and 4-track recorder on today’s Google doodle is just too fun. I lost 15 minutes to this.

Creativity and Curation: A Conversation About Finding and...

Tue, 22 May 2012 15:47:33 -0500

Creativity and Curation: A Conversation About Finding and Sharing Inspiration Online

New York City! Come see me and my friends at McNally Jackson on Wednesday, May 30th at 7PM:

Join Austin Kleon (author of Steal Like an Artist) as he interviews three of his favorite NYC ladies around the topic of collecting and sharing inspiration online. The panel will feature Maud Newton, legendary litblogger; Maria Popova, creator of the stupendously popular blog Brain Pickings; and Maris Kreizman, creator of the hilarious Tumblr blog Slaughterhouse 90210.

I will, of course, be signing copies of Steal Like An Artist. Tell yer friends! Printable poster (PDF) here.

"One of the oldest and honorable research methods in art … is copying."

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:19:00 -0500

“One of the oldest and honorable research methods in art … is copying.”

- Andrew Raftery (quoted by @johnmaeda)

Cover art for Genesis’ “Misunderstanding” by Lionel...

Mon, 21 May 2012 21:28:00 -0500

Cover art for Genesis’ “Misunderstanding” by Lionel Koechlin

Heaven, the new album from The Walkmen, is streaming at NPR.

Mon, 21 May 2012 16:35:00 -0500

Heaven, the new album from The Walkmen, is streaming at NPR.

"Some of you really need to take a bath. Seriously. A little soap won’t kill you. You..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 16:11:00 -0500

“Some of you really need to take a bath. Seriously. A little soap won’t kill you. You won’t be ‘selling out.’”

- Bobcat Goldthwait’s commencement speech, “Success is for creeps”

"The only solution [to social media addiction] is not one that most people want to face, which is to..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:08:41 -0500

“The only solution [to social media addiction] is not one that most people want to face, which is to become lovers of solitude and silence… I love to spend time alone in my room, and in my ideal world the first hour of every day would be in bed, writing down thoughts, harvesting dreams, before anyone phones or you have any internet access. I write on paper, cause if you write on a laptop, it’s too tempting to go online. You look up a word and then an hour later you remember why you went on…”

- V. Vale

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in RE/SEARCH #4/5 (1982) ...

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:08:33 -0500

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in RE/SEARCH #4/5 (1982)

RE/SEARCH is an Archive and Oral History Project that began in 1977 by V. Vale at City Lights Books. RE/SEARCH grew out of Search & Destroy, which Jello Biafra, Dead Kennedys founder, called “the best Punk Rock publication, ever. It combined art and photography with in-depth interviews and articles.”

Here’s the table of contents.

Buy it on Amazon→

H/T this Believer interview with V. Vale

My iPad doodles of Stephanie Pereira’s Kickstarter talk at...

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:29:04 -0500

My iPad doodles of Stephanie Pereira’s Kickstarter talk at the 2012 See Change conference

While listening to Stephanie’s talk, it occured to me that even if you don’t use Kickstarter as your funding model, there’s so much to steal from their model—especially their ideas about how to bring your audience into your story.

"Say it again: ‘Poetry is for everyone.’ Poetry is a place and it is free to all."

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:09:00 -0500

“Say it again: ‘Poetry is for everyone.’ Poetry is a place and it is free to all.”

- William Burroughs

Teaser trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The...

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:51:45 -0500

Teaser trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master

Hell. Yes.

How Phil Collins’ 1980 home demos led him to a new way of...

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:36:00 -0500

How Phil Collins’ 1980 home demos led him to a new way of recording

I always use my demos as the masters: Whatever I do at home ends up being the blueprint for the song. —Phil Collins

The above video features Phil Collins’ home demos for the songs “I Missed Again” and “If Leaving Me Is Easy”—they were released on a maxi-single along with his debut album Face Value in 1981.

Some history:

While delivering Genesis’ Duke album to Ahmet Ertegun in London, Collins shared some of his solo demos with the Atlantic Records guru. “He said, ‘You’ve got to do this and I’ll help you any way I can. You’ve got to record them,’” Collins recalls. “I said, ‘I can’t record them again. I’ve sort of sweated blood getting this far.’ So he said, ‘You tell me how I can help.’” Ertegun agreed that somehow Collins could work with the demos as masters and when Collins called engineer/producer Hugh Padgham into the project, he also agreed.

Phil was already making demos as a way of showing the other Genesis members his ideas for songs — witness this “Misunderstanding” demo.

Here’s the demo for “In The Air Tonight”:

If the Roland drum machine sounds on the demo are really familiar, that’s because they were actually used for the album:

[The demo] was recorded on a 1-inch 8-track analog recorder made by a company called Brennell. “We transferred my 8-track demos to 16-track,” Collins says, “which is all we had at the time. My eight tracks comprised stereo Prophet, stereo Rhodes, my voice, vocoder and a drum machine. I sang it again because the quality of what I had recorded really wasn’t as good as we needed, but on all of the tracks, I kept all the instruments, and that’s been my method of recording ever since. I always use my demos as the masters: Whatever I do at home ends up being the blueprint for the song.”

I’ve always been a huge fan of demos, and there’s something about these demos that has a rawness that isn’t present in the official releases. A Google search for “phil collins Demo” brings up much more.

Thanks, Daily Vinyl #4 and #36

Filed under: Phil Collins

“Fair Use,” inside back cover of Craphound #5 by Sean...

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:04:52 -0500

“Fair Use,” inside back cover of Craphound #5 by Sean Tejaratchi

Sean sent this to me after we came in contact over the Banksy/plagiarism stuff:

It’s the inside back cover I did for Crap Hound No.5. It’s a summary of the idea of Fair Use, and it addresses common questions and misconceptions. Feel free to pass it along to anyone if you think it’ll help. It was made about ten years ago, so it should probably be passed along with that warning, in case any new details have changed in the law.

"If you find something original check to see where it was stolen from."

Sun, 20 May 2012 13:29:27 -0500

“If you find something original check to see where it was stolen from.”

- Matt Thomas

Damn Good Advice by George Lois Last week I had the very...

Sun, 20 May 2012 13:24:25 -0500

Damn Good Advice by George Lois

Last week I had the very strange and imposter sydrome-esque experience of being the closing speaker at a conference that George Lois opened, so I picked up his book and read it on the plane home.

Lois, in case you don’t know, is a legend of advertising and one of the models for Don Draper on the show Mad Men.¹ (He’s interviewed a lot in the movie Art & Copy.

What you need to know about Lois, other than his huge body of work, is summed up quite succinctly in section #115: “My professional practice derives directly from romantic ideas of the superhuman artist.”

So, given my contempt for “creative” as a noun, you can imagine how many things I disagreed with in this book, but I was also surprised by how many things I was touched by, particularly towards the end of the book, when Lois softens up a bit with the ego and becomes a little less “superhuman” and more “human”: he reads the New York Times every day, he goes to The Met every Sunday to look at art, he’s been with his wife and muse for over 60 years, he hates Twitter but loves drawing, he believes in extolling mentors, etc.

The book is full of good war stories, and if you’re interested in the history of advertising, I’d recommend it — especially contrasted with Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Ad Man or the work of Howard Gossage.

How does Lois feel about Mad Men? “The more I think about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult. So, fuck you, Mad Men…besides, when I was in my 30s I was better-looking than Don Draper.” ↩