Thao & Mirah “How Dare You” from Yours Truly on Vimeo.

The last physical album I brought was Mirah’s “Advisory Committee”, back in 2005, because I couldn’t buy it any other way. I’m a huge fan, and I hardly like any music, let alone any single artist, enough to say that. The new album is the combined talents of Mirah and Thao, who are both singer/songwriters with long careers. To me, April 2011 sounds like the future of music has been taken off pause since JSBX recorded a cover of Dub Narcotic’s “Fuck Shit Up“.

(And no, your beepy boopy techno music doesn’t count as “the future”. It’s all well and good but it’s just Terry Riley’s “In C” with extra bells and a whistle posse. Sorry.)

The hard part for any person who is creative is to go back to work and keep being creative. I know that I’m more creative at night; sometime I have to rouse myself out of bed to finish something, or make a note of an idea. But there have been times in my life when it’s just been hard to get the creative juices flowing, especially when I’ve been forced into other peoples schedules.

However, to hang on in there for the 12 years that Josh Mirman states as the period it takes to become a “success”, you’re going to need some strategies. Here’s a few inspirational things that have kept me going recently:

• Sustainable Creativity, by Micheal Nobbs, is a good start for anyone with less-than amazing energy. Nobbs has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (like I do now) and his discussion of what it takes to keep going on and being creative, when you can hardly keep going with the normal stuff.
• How To Steal Like An Artist is a good guide to the other part of being creative: getting inspiration.
• Back to Work is a weekly podcast by Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin about knuckling down and doing things, but it’s a lot more entertaining than that. I often listen to it in the background while I’m working.
• Fear of Missing Out is a blogpost by Caterina Fake, one of the people who created the photosharing site Flickr (remember that? Used to be huge, sort of prototype social networking). In it, she tells us why social media isn’t always the best thing to pay attention to – you’ll end up craving the funfunfun that your friends are having, and forgetting to make your own fun. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you find making things fun.
• From Your Desks, by Kate Donnelly, is my favourite blog right now. It’s just interview after interview with brainy writers, artists, and designers, showing you their workspace. I find this fascinating, because it allows you to see the many and varied different ways that people create. Just like I work best at night, other people work in the morning. It’s about finding what works for you, and making a space so that you can come back and do it repeatedly.

Today, millions of UK citizens are taking to the streets to protest the governments cuts. In Germany, a few weeks ago, they had a carnival where people threw sweets from the floats. It was ace.

• The Open-Source Swan Pedalo Project – whilst some Linux luminaries took the stance that real things couldn’t be open-source, (my ex-flatmate) John O’Shea thinks that his shiny swan pedalo can. I’m backing John on this one.
• Mick Farren has a blog. You might not know who Mick Farren is, but he was one of my favourite authors when I was growing up. He’s just worth looking up in general, although his stand-out sci-fi book is The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys, which occurred maybe like a third of the way through his career but is amazing.
• A blog about creative people’s desks. Stunningly good, giving me a peek into what other people’s desks look like. I’m going to try and blog mine, hopefully encourage a few other creative people to share what their workspace looks like.
• Kerrin’s blog. One of those people I stalk across the internet because they are interesting and nice.
• The now-dormant Galacticast’s take on the Phantom Zone (from before embedding, it seems). I like to refer to Bedfordshire as the Phantom Zone, but I’m thinking of the version of it in the Supergirl film. Not the version of it with fart jokes.
• Drool-worthy urban cycling gear. Not sure about wax coats though
• Swanky urban bag thing. I surely don’t need another expensive bag, no matter how many zips it has on it
• Mike Duckett’s Pictures of Newcastle Coffee Shops makes me jealously wish I lived somewhere cool, or that I had the outrageously nifty drawing skills that Mike has.

Finally, these people might turn out to be the new Galacticast:

I use a number of different browsers on my main computer, and when I fire up Chrome this video starts. This usually leads to me finding it and stopping it from playing, even though I’ve been keeping it because I intend to stick it up on my blog. But that was ages ago, and now I just find myself scrolling through tabs muttering “shut up!” trying to find it.

Funnily enough, I like to imagine that “shut up shut up SHUT UP” is also the Conservative reaction to this sort of logically talk on “austerity”.

Biggleswade is not an exciting place to look at, as the above photo shows. So, when I took up drawing way back in the past, sometime around 2000, I found that I wasn’t at all interested in drawing the landscape around me. I was really fixated on drawing the people around me.

Sometime earlier, in the 90s, I had found myself failing a course at the local art college. I don’t really have much of a recollection of it, but I know my drawing style was very different back then. I was interested in drawing design-like sketches, and I would make very super-neat drawings of inventions and things in my sketchbooks. Like so:

After I flunked out of that course, I didn’t pick up any art materials for a few years. After a while, though, I began experimenting with painting and collage, often while stoned. But, as Mike pointed out in a comment under the last entry, doing work stoned just doesn’t pan out. I’ve put a thumbnail of one of those early painted pieces in this entry, but I have a few sketchbooks of this sort of stuff, slowly sticking their pages together as the weight of the book bears down on itself.

But then, I have a lot of sketchbooks:

I’ve heard of elderly artists who have rooms full of sketchbooks, paintings, and drawings, and to be honest, it was one of the main reasons that made me switch over to using digital media. Sadly, the perfect lifestyle never really came together for me, and the last time I moved I spent all day moving boxes by hand. I have a feeling I’ll never be a techno-nomad!

Other artists I’ve talked to about this problem of book-cruft have told me about throwing out notebooks. But for me, these notebooks seem really personal. Not all of them; some of them are not that interesting, but I haven’t given myself the time to go through them and throw out uninteresting things yet. Looking through them, I found myself recollecting about the times they covered, but also how my techniques changed.

Earlier on, I was trying out more materials, trying to get a feel for sketching bodies. My later work, when I got better, was mostly done in pencils, still trying to get the feel for bodies. I concentrated on people, as I found that I couldn’t draw the things in my house, because it was impossible to “see” them – I already had a mental image of what those things looked like.

After eight months of working as a cleaner and then hanging out, sketching friends of mine, I went back to college on an Art and Design Foundation. It really inspired me and got me to concentrate on doing drawings of people. The two images above are from some life drawing sessions I did (for non-artists: where you draw naked people) and show my favourite drawings of that time.

Those drawings aren’t very representative, so I’ve also made a video of me leafing through a sketchbook from that period:

I did other things, such as this lino print, based on my drawings. But pretty much the whole year of the course was based on doing drawing, which I continued doing when I was around my friends. This led to a massive drawing done at a Bacchanalian New years Eve party:

What I didn’t realise at the time was how much this art practice was reliant upon a functional social life. When I reached university my social life stopped dead for about two years, and life drawing classes were hideously oversubscribed, bringing an end to the life drawing aspects of my sketchbooks. Instead, I began to experiment with colours and shapes, and ended up doing a lot of work like this:

Weirdly, when I was sitting on the grass at Newcastle University in 2009, I saw an art student using almost exactly the same technique. This is basically an advanced doodle! But I’ll try to talk about that in my next post.

Thanks for sticking around through this EPIC post! If you read this far, feel free to ask for the “late-to-life-drawing-lesson” story in the comments. Warning: it’s pretty gross.

Because, jeez, that spam is irritating. And jeez, the comments on other sites are fucking irritating. In fact, commenting has got to such a stage at this point in history that it’s propensity to turn into a slanging match is well known. But is that the right thing? Should we keep commenting as it is, or is it a system that should evolve?

• The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory – normal person + anonymity + audience = fuckwad. It’s a truism that you can also get on a slightly-more-polite t-shirt.
• Engadget Turns Off Comments – when a bear-pit like Engadget, whose business plan is dependent upon page-views, turns off it’s comments, you know something is up. “What is normally a charged — but fun — environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable.” they said, because citing the above theory would not have a calming effect. They’re back on now though, but by default casual browsers don’t see them.
• Speak Your Branes – one of the earliest sites dedicated to lampooning the miserable commentator. The choices are mainly culled from the Have Your Say forums of the BBC, which I’m not familiar with. Sounds hellish though.
• Help us improve debate on CiF (Guardian) – the Guardian is one of the sites where I feel most dismayed by comments. Some subjects, especially the arts coverage, turn into a spiteful mirror of the message of the written article when the comments start. I think that some of what they are suggesting might help, but I’m not sure that having the author of a piece engage with trollish behaviour will do anything to improve matters there.
• Antisocial Web Script for Greasemonkey – if you can’t beat ‘em, delete ‘em.
• A Comment on Comments – from Suw Anderson, a mover and shaker in the media world, who notes that most news websites forums are toxic wastelands, and asks these organisations to reconsider the idea of ‘social’. I actually left a length comment on this piece, maybe you could read that. I only made one spelling mistake (I think…)
• Why there are no comments on Daring Fireball – one of my favourite blogs on the internet, as much as for the voice as the content, responds to criticism that his site should have comments: “I care about what’s best.” Scroll down to the second half of the post for his extended views, which are worth reading.
• Anger Management for Trolls – a contemporary piece from Wired magazine, which states that science will stop those pesky humans with their bad thoughts. I dunno, Wired, I’m dubious… maybe it has something to do with human nature?

That is a lot of linkage for now, and I’m going to let you click and mull to your own conclusion.  But here’s one last thing, from Mitchell and Webb, which Suw Anderson used in her piece:

I have such a hard-on for that song, every time I hear it. I rediscovered the Talking Heads when I was staying in a pub on the coast. I’d gone to bed, and then, as I lay there trying to sleep, I heard the music come through the walls.

Normally, I hate any sort of late-night disturbance. But the album that was playing was one of the three albums I had when I was deep into being a teenage douchebag, all pimples and sitting in from of the TV, no talking to parents or adequate cleansing routine.

That night, I heard every. Single. Track. From “Once in a Lifetime”, the best of album I had on tape, that I had long ago thrown out, because it wasn’t “cool” like Neds Atomic Dustbin or PWEI (I know, huh?).

I picked up copy of Sand in the Vaseline (the two-disk version of Once in a Lifetime) soon after that, but it wasn’t until I saw the live movie they did, Stop Making Sense, that I became so infused by the band. Even the later, weirder stuff, where the rest of the band have pissed off and it’s just David Byrne and some session guys. I tried to like the solo stuff, and the stuff he did with Eno, but really it’s the other people that make Talking Heads great.

For instance, half-way through the Stop Making Sense video, David Byrne pisses off to do a clothes change and drink water, so the rest of the band play some track called “the Genius of Love”. This was later sampled by Mariah Carey to become the 1990s uber-hit “Fantasy”. That’s right: the other guys in Talking Heads were so shit-hot that they basically hard-baked Mariah Carey’s career into success.

Now that’s a band.

This comes from a set of videos on YouTube where the soundtrack has been replaced, an idea originating on the Something Awful forums. It’s a smart idea.

(Do we need to have forums to make sense of the internet? Even the most dedicated forum has an ‘off-topic’ section, which is usually five times more interesting than the on-topic stuff.)

Uh, right, okaaaaay. Let’s compare that to the original, recorded live in 1978:

(It’s a Youtube video, but embedding is disabled for some reason. Click the picture to make some noise.)

Which one did you think was better? I rest my case.

———-

Bonus video! Radiohead’s “Nude” covered by machine band BUT DONE RIGHT: