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Download: Nine Songs (Plus One) by Blind Blake

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Click the above photo of Blind Blake — the only photo of the musician known to exist — to visit a site offering MP3s of Dry Bone Shuffle (1927), He’s In The Jailhouse Now, Bad Feeling Blues (1927), Too Tight Blues #2 (1929), Southern Rag (1927), Doggin’ Me Mama Blues (1928), Georgia Bound (1929) , Champagne Charlie (1932), and Police Dog Blues (1929). And right click here and select “Save Link As…” to download Diddie Wa Diddie. All of the aforementioned songs are, apparently, in the public domain.

YouTube Finds

Ira Glass on…

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The basics:

Finding great stories:

Good taste (my favorite!):

Excerpt:

All of us who do creative work, like, you know, we get into it, and we get into it because we have good taste. Do you know what I mean? You want to make TV because you love TV, you know what I mean? Because there’s stuff that you just, like, love. Okay? So you’ve got really good taste and you get into this thing that, that, I don’t even know how to describe it, but it’s like there’s a gap that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, okay, it’s not that great, it’s, it’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. You know what I mean? You can tell that it’s still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase; a lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like to say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where, they had really good taste, they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be, they knew it fell short, and, and, like, some of us can admit that to ourselves and some of us are a little less able to admit that to ourselves, but we knew that, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have, and the thing I would say to you is, everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve gotta know, it’s totally normal, and the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. You know what I mean? Whatever it’s gonna be, like, you create the deadline. It’s best if you have somebody who’s waiting for work from you, somebody who’s expecting work from you, even if it’s not somebody who pays you, but that you’re in a situation where you have to turn out the work, because it’s only actually by going through a volume of work, that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

Two common pitfalls:

BONUS LINK:

This American Life: Radio Archive

Comics · Here, Read · Look Here · Wallace Wood

Look Here: “22 Panels that…”

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“Wally Wood‘s 22 Panels That Always Work!!”:

[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]

Ivan Brunetti’s “22 Panels That Always Work* (*Sometimes)”:

“Cheese‘s 22 Panels That Never Work!!”:

And…

Jon Morris’s “16 Panels That I Don’t Think Work All That Well (But Which People Keep Using Over and Over) (Also, I Couldn’t Think of 22, So Wally Wood Wins)”:

Also…

Michael Oeming’s “A Powers Study of Wally Wood’s ’22 panels that always work'”:

PLEASE NOTE that, on 04 May 2013, I updated the bonus link below to point to an Internet Archive Wayback Machine version of Joel Johnson’s post because I noticed that my link to the blog entry on Johnson’s site was dead. On the same day, I posted Joel Johnson’s various scans as bonus images in order to preserve them for posterity.

BONUS LINK:

Wally Wood’s 22 Panels that Always Work: Unlimited Edition – Joel Johnson outlines the history of the famous 22 panels and offers, for your downloading pleasure, various “high-resolution versions of ‘Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work’ in ‘Unlimited Edition,’ scanned in from the original paste-up.” Here’s an excerpt in which Larry Hama describes the genesis “22 Panels”:

I worked for Wally Wood as his assistant in the early ’70s, mostly on the Sally Forth and Cannon strips he did for the Overseas Weekly. I lettered the strips, ruled borders, swipe-o-graphed reference, penciled backgrounds and did all the other regular stuff as well as alternating with Woody on scripting Cannon and Sally Forth.

The “22 Panels” never existed as a collected single piece during Woody’s lifetime. Another ex-Wood assistant, Paul Kirchner had saved three Xeroxed sheets of the panels that would comprise the compilation. I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio to constantly remind himself to stop what he called “noodling.”

When I was starting out as an editor at Marvel, I found myself in the position of having to coach fledgling artists on the basics of visual storytelling, and it occurred to me that the reminder sheets would help in that regard, but three eight-by-ten pieces of paper were a bit unwieldy, so I had Robby Carosella, the Marvel photostat guy at the time, make me re-sized copies of all the panels so I could fit them all on one sheet. I over-compensated for the half-inch on the height (letter paper is actually 8 1/2-by-11) so the main body of images once pasted up came a little short. I compensated for that by hand lettering the title.

BONUS IMAGES: JOEL JOHNSON’S ORIGINAL “22 PANELS” UNLIMITED EDITION SCANS

Commonplace Book · Movies · Woody Allen

Woody Allen on work…

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“It’s a way of coping with the world. You know, in the same way that somebody copes with it by being a stamp collector or a sports addict or a titan of industry or an alcoholic or something. My way of coping with the horrors of existence is to put my nose to the grindstone and work and not look up.”

— from “The Director’s Craft: Woody Allen reflects on ‘Vicky Christina Barcelona,’ love and his life,” by Rachel Abramowitz, Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2008.

Art Instruction · Artistic Anatomy · Download Here

Download Here: “Constructive Anatomy” by George B. Bridgman

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Here’s a classic art instruction book by George B. Bridgman (1864-1943), first published in May 1920 and now in the public domain (see Wikipedia: “According to s. 6 of the [Canadian Copyright] Act the copyright of a work lasts the life of the author plus 50 years from the end of the calendar year of death“; “In the United States, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain“), available from Ragged Claws Network as a free download (click the cover image):

constructiveanatomy

Here are some teaser images:

Artist Self-Portraits · Fine Art · Look Here · Max Beckmann

Look Here: Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait with Saxophone”

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Self-Portrait with Saxophone is not only my favourite of Max Beckmann’s many self-portraits but also one of my favourite self-portrait paintings of all time. Beckmann’s painting technique, which in his later works can sometimes be a bit messy and offhanded, is beautifully controlled and economical here. The quilted (silk?) robe, which in real life would be soft but sort of slick to the touch, reminds me also of the tough protective skin of a pineapple or a pangolin, though here the underbelly, so to speak, is open and unprotected, with the casual posture, meaty hands, steady gaze, and set jaw of the artist projecting boundless confidence and creative power such that even the ordinarily rigid metallic musical instrument seems to bend and twist in conformity with the artist’s pose and grip rather than vice versa.

ABOVE: Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait with Saxophone (1930), oil on canvas, 55 1/8 x 27 3/8 in., Kunsthalle, Bremen.

Art Collection · Drawing · Ebay Win · George Woodbridge · Look Here

Ebay Win: “Mt. Arrarat Flood Victims” by George Woodbridge

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As of 12 July 2008, my wife and I are the proud owners of the following artwork by cartoonist George Woodbridge:

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The image area of the drawing, which first appeared in print in Mad Magazine as part of a piece entitled “Appeals from Charities through History,” is 9 x 6 inches.

The total cost, shipping included, was US$55.95.

So now we have two — count ’em, TWO — pieces by George Woodbridge in our modest but growing collection of original comic-book (and other) art.

George Woodbridge (1930-2004) joined Mad Magazine’s “usual gang of idiots” in 1957 and had work in nearly every issue thereafter. He also worked at Marvel during the 1950s on titles such as Astonishing, Battle Action, and Kid Colt.

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