Austin Kleon – Page 558

MP3 MONDAY: MOULTY!

Monday, November 6, 2006

I remember the days when things were real bad for me
It was right after my accident, when I lost my hand…

[audio:http://www.austinkleon.com/mp3monday/moultybarbarians.mp3]

* * *

“Moulty” was a song by a Cape Cod garage band called the Barbarians, who in 1964 grew shoulder-length hair, wore sandals, and were fronted by a one-armed drummer with a hook.

Moulty was drummer/singer Victor Moulton, who at the age of 14 had lost his left hand while he was building a pipe bomb, and this 1965 single is a recitation by Moulton (backed not by the other Barbarians, but a cadre of New York session musicians including, allegedly, members of Levon and the Hawks, soon to become the Band) about his accident and how it changed his life. The monologue, written by producer Doug Morris, is sappier than a sugar maple in March, but the combination of the cheesy recitation and the sloppy rock and roll backing, with its drunk-sounding, ragged massed backing vocals, is oddly appealing. The Barbarians didn’t think so, and left Laurie Records soon after the single was released without the band’s consent.

I can’t get enough of this song. It’s so goofy and hilarious, but so earnest. It makes me happy.

If you head over to Rbally, you can listen to a version of Yo La Tengo doing it live with Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith’s guitar player, and the compiler of the original Nuggets collection on which “Moulty” was collected) in 2005. Also, be sure to check out some video of Victor’s one-handed drumming.

“Moulty!”

HOW DO YOU SHOW THEM WHAT YOU’VE DONE?

Thursday, November 2, 2006

A little exercise in information design/gallery hanging today:

What’s the best way to let total strangers know what it is that you do? If you’re a multi-disciplinary artist, how do you express the range of your work? How can a portfolio page engage a viewer/newcomer as well as a piece of art?

I like the blog format because I never feel limited by what I can post…but I do think that it can get fairly daunting sifting through a lot of the material that’s up here. And as an advertising device to grad schools it’s probably ludicrous. (Although I have had people say, “I’m having fun making my way through your site…”)

Right now, I’m working on a new portfolio page that’s a little more organized/intuitive than going down the sidebar and clicking on textual links. I’m trying to make it fun, graphical, and easy to use. This is a sketch of what I want it to look like.
This idea was a little inspired by McCloud’s pyramid chart of cartoonists in UNDERSTANDING COMICS (pages 52-53). I’m too lazy to scan it right now, but to way over-simplify it, the x-y axis of the pyramid showed the movement from realistic depiction of objects all the way to the abstraction of language.
Because I find myself constantly oscillating between pictures and words, I figured that might be the best way to show the range of what I do:

PICTURES <---------------|-----------------> WORDS

Comics are right in the middle.

WORKING ASS BACKWARDS

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Most cartoonists wait til the final stage of their process to pull out the ink and the brush. Not me. I like to get out the brush early in the morning, and do my rough sketches in sloppy ink. There’s something about the brush, the way it can cover a lot of surface in a really short period of time, that helps free me up and go wild.

These are a couple preliminary sketches for an album cover I’m going to do. They’re probably stupid things to post, because they’re so abstract you can barely tell what’s going on…but what the hell. It’s November.

A HALLOWEEN TREAT: GHOULARDI SAYS, “STAY SICK! TURN BLUE!”

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

“As I got older…I kept thinking, ‘What is this Ghoulardi thing? What is it? What? What?’ We went back to Cleveland once when I was 14 and we were mobbed at the airport by people chanting ‘Ghoulardi! Ghoulardi!’ And when I do interviews anywhere in the country, constantly, constantly, people who are enamored of my father or who grew up with him bring him up or even thank me for Ghoulardi!”

– PT Anderson, interview with the Toledo Blade, 2000

WMFU’s Beware of The Blog! beat me to the punch:

Cleveland’s most legendary horror host was unmistakably Ghoulardi. He was only on the air for about three years (63-66), but he left an indelible impression. His real name was Ernie Anderson, and after retiring Ghoulardi, he moved to Hollywood and become a legendary voice-over artist (he was the voice of The Love Boat, the Carol Burnett Show, and pretty much every top 40 radio station). He is also the father of none other than director Paul Thomas Anderson, who pretty much based the Philip Baker Hall character in Magnolia on him.

But most importantly, Ghoulardi used that booming, commanding voice to unleash an anarchistic spirit. Rather than just play bad movies and make jokes, he began setting up blue screens and dropping in random images over the top of the film, or making strange noises over the soundtrack. And things weren’t any better outside of the movie, where his set could be pure chaos. He was topical, he was funny as hell, he was just plain weird, he WAS the counterculture invading the average middle-American’s television. Nobody that saw a Ghoulardi show ever forgot it, and in a way he shaped the weird climate of Cleveland in the late 60s and early 70s. David Thomas of Pere Ubu was one of his disciples and describes watching his show as such:

“Everyone who saw Ghoulardi will tell a favorite story – like the night he set off a egregiously large home-made explosive device sent it by a fan – he was always setting off fireworks and blowing up things in the studio – and quite clearly off-camera crew were telling Ghoulardi not to light it up and you could see people running across the studio, the camera abandoned to skew off balance, pointing at the floor, and then the entire room was stunned senseless for some minutes… live… smoke, curtains on fire, people stumbling around…”

PAUL WAS AN APOSTLE, JUDAS WAS AN APOSTATE

Monday, October 30, 2006

Greetings from GRE-studying hell! For the next two weeks, your humble entertainer will be busy learning obscure words. Words like “adumbrate,” “bedizen,” and “calumniate.” (He admits, he has only made it past the letter “C” in his Hit Parade.)

To keep his sanity, your humble entertainer will still be scratching and posting pretty pictures, and might even continue giving those pictures silly mnemonics titles, like: “chary is to be wary!,” “asperity is severity!,” and “a minister prone to cozen, a congregation hozen!”

And if text and links are what you’re looking for, go see Jessa at Bookslut. She’s been killin’ it lately.