Bob Dylan - Chronicles, volume one

I've just finished reading Chronicles, volume one, by Bob Dylan. It's a maze of a book - he skips around in his life - covers a period from about 1959 to 1989 (I think), but not in chronocological order, so I had to keep looking for dates to see what decade he was writing about.

In Chronicles, Dylan writes about the singers and writers and artists who inspired him. I'll leave it to you to read the book (check 'World Cat search' to the left to find it in a library near you) to find out who most of them were. Some of them were people who I listened to when I was young (Hank Williams), who I found out about later (Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie), and who I'd never heard of before (Red Grooms).

On Dylan's web page you can find lyrics to his songs - a good thing since my copy of Modern Times has no lyrics in the liner notes. Dylan's Wikipedia page is extensive - there are 234 endnotes.

Craft and the Creative Process

Craft and the Creative Process is an exhibit put online by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2001. If you 'view by artist' you can see sketches, craft works, writing, and other ephemera by various craftspeople. What intrigued me were the oral history interview excerpts - I listened to the one with Anni Albers. Now I'm going to read the transcript. Explore the site until you find something that interests you.

Since there weren't very many audio file links on the exhibit page, I went to the Archives home page to see what else was in their Oral History Interviews web page. Turns out that there is much more than I'll ever have time to look at and listen to. Many of the interviews have transcripts and some have audio excerpts. You can choose to look through all the records, those with transcripts, or those with audio (13 today).

The Archives has excellent and extensive resources: exploring the site is time consuming but very rewarding.

I originally found out about Craft and the Creative Process in the SuperNaturale Newsletter back in 2005.

Richard Serra at MoMA

Richard Serra at MoMA - Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence

This YouTube video [link included since embedding may not be working or the code changes - Dec. 21/07] shows one of the five "MoMAvideos" of works by Richard Serra currently showing on YouTube. There are thirty videos there altogether, as of today. If you want to see a better quality video, go to the Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years site. MoMA has done an excellent online presentation for the exhibit. Since the actual show closed on September 10, this is the only way anyone is going to get to see it from now on.

The site has walkthroughs and dialogue between Serra and the interviewer, often providing a feel of what it would be like to be inside the sculpture. Many pictures of the works on the website, no matter the actual location, have an accompanying discussion by Serra, which provides context for the work, and his reasons for using the materials, how he found them and put them together.

The site has fairly good navigation, although I found that titles sometimes stayed on the screen and got in the way of the images. My quibble would be that not all of the images are in colour. I would have been happier to see the colours of the works, especially when Serra talks about texture and appearance.