Somebody needs to know the time
10 things worth sharing this week
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
I did a lot of design work on the next book this week, a lot of it constrained by what you can do in black and white on a 6"x6" page. To take a break from greyscale, I've been doing a bunch of color drawings in the studio on old pages of sheet music. I’m using a set of Caran d'Ache Classic Neocolor II Water-Soluble Pastels I picked up after learning about them from Tom Sachs. (I may splurge on the big set when these are used up!)
Walt Disney said he thought Mary Blair must be colorblind because she came up with such amazing color combinations. I’m red-green colorblind, and most of my life I’ve been scared or confused by color. (My collage work and my block prints have helped me loosen up a bit.) I’m in awe of people who can really do color, and part of my urge to use color this week came from reading cartoonist Tara Booth’s Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It. Booth’s formally trained (and her grandparents are watercolor artists!) but her use of color is just so free and unexpected, it makes you want to join along in the fun. Check her out on Instagram: @tarabooth.
I’m in love with this story about Kate Bingaman-Burt texting and befriending a roof cleaner and sign painter.
Beatlemania! I enjoyed Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which I first heard about from my friend Alan Jacobs. The book began five years ago as a 10,000-word essay called “64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney.” Every time I read a book about The Beatles it sends me on a Beatles binge. At the moment, I’m watching a VHS rip of the original Anthology broadcast on ABC. (I think the best book I’ve ever read about The Beatles is Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. For recording nerds, check out engineer Geoff Emerick’s Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles.)
“The closest that Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week that the Sergeant Pepper album was released.... At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.” Langdon Winner on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Imagine leaving “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” off your next album!) It really is a great summer record — sounds good cranked in the studio and in the car. I’m obsessed with Paul McCartney’s bass lines and how he recorded them — he’d stay in the studio after the other Beatles had left, the engineers would roll his bass amp into the middle of the studio, and he’d keep them up all night punching in and out of the track until he got the lines he wanted. (See item #7 in my letter “Roll up your sleeves!”)
Podcast: Walter Martin’s organ episode was a delight. (And I was chuffed to hear I got the highest score on the quiz.)
The erasure notebooks of poet Mary Ruefle. (Don’t miss her typewriter interview!)
“I'm not sure how it's happened, but I think that somehow I've forgotten to die.” Artist still enjoying life as she turns 107.
“Until his death at the age of 106, Tyrus Wong (1910-2016) was America’s oldest living Chinese American artist and one of the last remaining artists from the golden age of Disney animation. The quiet beauty of his Eastern-influenced paintings caught the eye of Walt Disney, who made Wong the inspirational sketch artist for Bambi.” I really enjoyed the documentary Tyrus. (I would very much like to make my own kites and fly them on the beach.)
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xoxo,
Austin
PS. Here’s a little video of me talking about 5 books that inspired Keep Going, my book about staying creative in chaotic times:
My Dad taught me as a kid to make kites out of thin colored paper with rags for the tail. They flew better than those you find in a store. I was still making them and flying them into adulthood.
The little aside on being red green color blind caught my attention. I passed that gene along to my son and from coloring Abraham Lincoln pink in Kindergarten (the art teacher was not happy) to making cables at a summer job (all you have to do is put the green and red cables together with the yellow), it sure made life that much more challenging. It’s a color coded world! You sure wear it well! Thank you for sharing that.