Austin Kleon – Page 549

ESPRESSO + LIBRARYTHING

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Trying my best to copy Don, I bought an espresso machine and started playing around with LibraryThing. It’s my day off, so I’m going to spend it on caffeine, reading like a madman, and blogging like crazy to make up for the severe lack of posts lately. Stay tuned.

As for the reading: In addition to being a National Book Award nominee, Gene Yang did his master’s thesis on comics and education. Dover Thrift has some really cheap, really amazing art books. Joann Sfar is one of the best men in comics, period. McCarthy’s new book is dark, depressing, and beautiful — like his last one, I think it’s basically a pulp novel, begging to be made into a movie. Saul Steinberg is January’s greatest (re)discovery. Arnheim’s book is on Tufte’s reading list, so I’m down.

BEWARE THE WATER HAMMER

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

A little clip from my sumi-e doodles.

It’s finally cold now, so the pipes in our apartment are knocking like crazy. Nothing like facing the snow with little sleep to bring out the grouch in you.

Just starting to work again, so not much to post. Really, really, really getting into Saul Steinberg. Thank goodness for the Complete New Yorker set. Listening to lots of Cee-Lo, Gnarls Barkley, and Dangerdoom. Also, making my way through Doom 2. (Lots of doom to match the gloom…)

How ’bout that 24, eh?

LYNDA SIGNS WITH D + Q

Friday, January 12, 2007

In case you haven’t already heard, my heroine and all-around-awesome-gal, Lynda Barry, has signed a publishing deal with Drawn + Quarterly. They’ll not only be putting out her collage/comics work-in-progress book, What It Is, they’ll also be putting out a FIVE VOLUME SET of Ernie Pook’s Comeek!

In the meantime, in case I haven’t already stressed/mentioned it, my favorite place to check up on Lynda on the WWW is her Shop Super Marlys Ebay Store , where she posts little “outtakes” for sale like the piece from ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! above, with super-fantastic, revealing commentary like this:

Hey before Lynda figured out exactly how to do the water color work for the One Hundred Demons strips, she messed around a lot! This is hand ground Chinese ink and water color on lightweight drawing paper size 8x10ish, the image size is 6x6ish. And! I called Lynda up and said “Tell me more about this art!” and she says there were a couple of versions of the comic strip Hate which is in 100 Demons and this is a panel from a version that didn’t make it into the book. It features Lynda at her Jr. High School talking to two girls she actually grew up with but now there was Black Power and Lynda had suddenly become “Whitey”. She says about that time “It was BAD time! I wanted to be a Black Panter! Even I hated Whitey back then” I said “Back when? She said “1968, darlin’, a longass time ago.” I said “Do you still hate Whitey?” she said, “Well, I certainly hate White House Whitey and his flunky imps” and then she starts to go on about, you know, Bush, Cheney, and how bad everything is right now so I say OK! I have to go!

I’d actually been wondering about the size of the ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! stuff for a while. Search around and you shall receive.

“A HUMUMENT”, BY TOM PHILLIPS

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Last January, after seeing a couple of my newspaper blackout poems, Winston Smith e-mailed and recommended to me a book called “A Humument” by an artist named Tom Phillips. In the mid-sixties, Phillips took an old Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock called “A Human Document” and started blacking out the pages to make a new book, ” A Humument.” Well, I thought this sounded pretty interesting, but was too lazy to look it up, or even Google it, and pretty soon I’d forgotten all about it.

A year later, Drew Dernavich e-mails me a link to Humument.com, the official site of the book! Little did I know that you can see every page from the book online. (There’s also a new edition you can buy online from Amazon.)

Too cool.

“THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD ARE INVOLVED IN MAKING THINGS”

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

I was Google Image Searching the I [heart] NY logo, and came across this great 2003 interview between Milton Glaser and Chip Kidd published in The Believer. Hard to believe Glaser never made a penny off the design, which he basically donated to the city in the mid-seventies in hopes of boosting the city’s morale (and cleaning the dog crap off the street).

I found nearly every bit of the interview fascinating, especially his thoughts about developing ideas with sketching versus computers, but the story about his mother and father really hit home:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

Best of all? When he was a kid, he wanted to be a cartoonist.