Somebody asked Stravinsky what he did when he didn’t have any ideas.
“I wait,” he said. “I wait… like an insect waits.”
Wearing many hats
“You’re supposed to do one thing. If you do more than that, people get confused.”
—Margaret Atwood
“I made every mistake in the book. You should never do two things. You should hammer one nail all your life, and I didn’t do that; I hammered on a lot of nails like a xylophone.”
—Brion Gysin
“I really haven’t found a single subject I’m not somewhat interested in.”
—Jeremy Gleick, a UCLA student who devoted an hour every morning to learning something new
See also: Don’t discard.
Notes on Warhol
“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide whether it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they’re deciding, make even more art.”
—Andy Warhol
I like to play documentaries in the background when I’m photoshopping illustrations. This week I got sucked into the 4-hour American Masters on Andy Warhol. About a 1/3 of the way through, I realized I’d seen it before, back in 2010, and and I’d even taken detailed notes:
It was interesting to see which parts of the documentary still caught my attention after eight years — the quote about letting other people worry about whether it’s art, Stravinsky, being asked what he does when he’s out of ideas (“I wait like an insect waits.”), etc.
It’s also funny, all the connections to Warhol’s work I can make now that I didn’t make then. How I said to myself, “Oh, Dave Hickey is all over this!” How Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City clued me into his touch issues. How much of his diaries I’ve read. How the original soup cans show in LA was the same show Corita Kent saw that led to her screenprints. How many times I’ve listened to Songs for Drella!
He’s one of those artists that gets more and more interesting to me over the years…
Summer squad goals
I love this 1931 photo of Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Mary Reynolds lounging around on the French Riviera. Calvin Tompkins, in Duchamp: A Biography, gives us the context: “For several years [Duchamp and Reynolds] spent the month of August in a villa that Mary rented in Villefranche-sur-Mer, on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. Brancusi came to stay with them there in 1931; he set up his big camera on the terrace and took the photograph…”
Summer is for mono
In 2014, Damon Krukowski (do check out his podcast, Ways of Hearing, and his book, The New Analog) wrote “Back to Mono,” on why summer and mono listening go hand in hand:
The transistor radio sounds right to me in summer. Monaural AM radio reception changes with the weather, the temperature, the time of day, and just as we expose our bodies to the elements more in summer, it makes sense to me that audio should do the same. Plus, mono suits summer broadcasts so well: baseball games, violent storm warnings, the local oldies station (which plays mostly mono records anyway). How would stereo improve any of these?
I saw The Beatles in Mono box set at the library last week and checked it out. Not sure how many people know, but The Beatles saw stereo as a fad, and spent almost all of their time mixing their records in mono, leaving it to the engineers to make the stereo mixes. Brian Wilson mixed Pet Sounds in mono partially because he was deaf in one ear — he literally couldn’t make sense of stereo. (Mono also gave him control over what listeners would hear.) Later, Bruce Springsteen would mix Born To Run in a way that emulated that mono Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” style.
Related: Have you ever noticed how wonderful music from the first half of the 60s and earlier sounds on your tiny iPhone speakers?
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 277
- 278
- 279
- 280
- 281
- …
- 618
- Older posts→