86. A drawing every day
I.
Every October, hordes of people around the world take part in Inktober. The idea is to create a drawing every day. There are official prompt lists if you need inspiration, but essentially it’s about having the discipline to create something every day. This was my first time taking part.
My plan was to spend about ten minutes a day on a small drawing. It had to have something to do with horror, because October is, after all, Halloween month. Below you can see the results.
How I look back on a month of drawing:
-
The pictures start small and get slightly bigger, although you can’t see that in the image.
-
I never started over. If a sketch didn’t turn out the way I wanted (which happened every day), I had to carry on with it anyway. That made me more creative and taught me, as Joost Klein’s mantra goes, to trust the process.
-
I found a style quite quickly that I tried to stick to for the rest of the month.
-
Creating something new every day was very satisfying.
-
It was good practice in shading (I still have a lot to learn).
-
The rush to tick off or rush through a drawing when short on time shows up on the paper.
-
Drawing is about creating illusions; if you succeed, the mistakes in the drawing are less noticeable.
-
My personal favourites are numbers 4, 6, 11, 12, 23 and 31.
II.
Thom Yorke is currently on a solo tour on the other side of the world that has Radiohead fans salivating. He spends half the evening playing acoustic versions of the band’s finest songs. On YouTube, you can watch audience recordings of tracks including Fake Plastic Trees, Lucky, Karma Police and Sail To The Moon. Radiohead’s last album was released eight years ago, and the band’s last tour was six years ago. The band members are in no hurry to make a new record. Radiohead have no plans to do anything next year, Jonny Greenwood said recently. Everyone is busy with their own projects.
For instance, his brother Colin is playing on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ tour. Colin Greenwood released a photo book last month: How to Disappear: A Photographic Portrait of Radiohead. It features behind-the-scenes photos taken by the bassist between 2003 and 2018. He took them with a Yashica T4 Super, a 35mm compact camera. Given the 15-year period, the selection of photos is somewhat limited. But it does form an intimate portrait of the band.
Above all, we see a passion for music. Thom Yorke hasn’t even unpacked his suitcase before he’s already sitting at a keyboard. And Jonny Greenwood plays the violin in the bathroom. Because he loves the acoustics there so much, writes Colin Greenwood in an accompanying text. As well as being a collection of photographs, the book is also Greenwood’s look back at his time in the band. His fine writing already makes the work indispensable for Radiohead fans. Among other things, he describes the formation of Radiohead, his role within the band, what it’s like to kill time in dressing rooms, touring the United States and his fondness for James Bond. (I’m still angry that Radiohead’s Spectre wasn’t chosen as the Bond theme for the film of the same name.)
The Netherlands also features in the book. Radiohead played their very first ever festival gig (!) on Liberation Day in Haarlem. The band played on a Wednesday afternoon in 1993 as the second band of the day on a small stage, whilst Haarlem locals ate ice creams and walked past. “I don’t remember anything about the gig itself,” writes Greenwood. “But I remember the sight of people on granny bikes riding past the pond and rows of white and orange tulips. Later, the Dutch pop duo 2 Unlimited closed the festival at sunset with their wildly optimistic hit No Limit.”
Radiohead as the support act for 2 Unlimited. A wonderful image.
III.
As long as I still can, I’ll go to see Bob Dylan. Even if his tour schedule takes my pilgrimage to the not-so-bustling city of Düsseldorf. It doesn’t matter that the Mitsubishi Electric Halle is a massive gym.
A Dylan concert remains magical and is unlike any other concert. You can feel the tension running through the audience before the show starts. It helps that everyone has to put their phones in a locked bag. Such a phone ban has the same effect as in schools: suddenly, people start talking to each other again.
That’s how I got to know my neighbour. A man from the Netherlands, as it turned out after we’d exchanged a few sentences in English. From Utrecht, in fact – a fellow citizen. “I don’t really consider myself a Dylan fanatic, but I have written dozens of booklets about him,” he says. Then I recognise him: Jochen Markhorst; I was once at a Dylan afternoon at Broese bookshop where he was a guest. It’s a small world.
During the first song, All Along The Watchtower, from my spot at the side of the stage I can only see the top of Dylan’s head. The rest of his seated body is blocked by the sound engineer’s monitors on stage. Fortunately, the old master (83 years old) stands for the rest of the concert, so I can see him. The people in the rows below me are less fortunate.
Dylan has been an enigma for years and remains so even when you share a space with him. The lighting on stage is dimmed to pub levels, leaving him a vague silhouette. For much of the concert, Dylan leans over his piano like a pub singer. Though he is no longer the youngest, standing for over an hour and a half without support is perhaps not feasible. He shuffles across the stage. During the concert, I think about what this man has been doing for sixty years, where he’s been, what he’s achieved, what he’s meant to me for more than half my life. In the moment, it’s almost impossible to take in.
He comes across as more energetic than he did in Amsterdam in 2022. The songs are better too. Dylan may never be a genius pianist again, but the melodies he plays this time at least fit in better with what his band is playing. And he reaches for the harmonica more often. These are treats to be savoured. Desolation Row, Key West, Crossing The Rubicon, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue and, of course, Every Grain of Sand. A couple of young women were dancing down the aisle.
I have no idea if I’ll ever see Bob Dylan again. On 14 November he’s playing at the Royal Albert Hall in London, after which there are (as yet) no concerts planned. If this was the last time, then it was a fine finale. I’ve thought that for years, actually. So if he does return in the future, I’ll be there for the umpteenth time. For as long as I can.
PS.
Menno Kooistra and Maarten Janssens published the horror comic anthology Bloeddorst in 2007. After 17 years, a second volume is being released, in collaboration with director Martin Koolhoven. The theme of this second issue is therefore film. “It will be unsettling, creepy, under the skin, absurd, surreal and genre-bending,” the creators write on their website. The comic stories feature contributions from some of the biggest names in the industry, including Romano Molenaar, Thé Tjong-Khing and Fred de Heij. Via a crowdfunding campaign on voordekunst, you can already pre-order a copy, which will arrive on your doormat around Halloween next year.
In his newsletter, writer Warren Ellis discussed comic pages consisting of nine panels. A fine analysis of this specific art form, with clear examples. I believe you need to subscribe to read it, but you’ll be doing yourself a favour.
A colleague showed me this video (well-known but new to me) and everything has been different ever since.
---I read The Vegetarian by the brand-new Nobel Prize winner Han Kang. An incredible story about a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat from then on. Over time, she herself begins to display increasingly plant-like traits. Coincidentally, an essay by Alma Mathijsen about Han Kang and The Vegetarian. In it, Mathijsen writes about the main character: “She is someone who cannot live with the horrors we inflict on one another, and no longer wishes to be part of them. I cannot read it without thinking of the crimes currently taking place in the world.”
It’s nothing short of a week of celebration for fans of The Cure, as after sixteen years there’s a new album. Songs Of A Lost World is a pitch-black album of eight tracks, spread over almost 50 minutes. I love it, revelling in it with Robert Smith, whose voice truly seems to have eternal youth. The Cure celebrated the release of a new album with a concert, which was broadcast live on YouTube. The band played the new album in its entirety and then followed it up with another two hours, packed with hits such as A Forest, Friday I’m In Love, Boys Don’t Cry and Pictures Of You.
---It is fifty years since The Rumble in the Jungle, the legendary fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. It was the bout in which Ali regained the world title, after having lost his boxing licence years earlier for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. “I’m not going to fly 10,000 miles to kill another poor people, just to further the power of white slave masters at the expense of black people,” he said. “My enemies are here, not in Vietnam.” In a retrospective in NRC, I saw crystal-clear black-and-white photos of Ali from that time, including a stunning shot of Ali in the Netherlands, two years after Rumble in the Jungle. He sailed through the canals of Amsterdam and was then whisked off to Volendam. In an episode of Andere Tijden Sportfrom 2016, memories are shared.
---Wired looks back on setting up its first website, HotWired, thirty years ago. “We had meetings about whether we should include hyperlinks in our texts,” says Howard Rheingold, the site’s editor-in-chief. “That sounds now like asking whether you should use full stop, but back then everything was very, very new.”
Donald Trump is campaigning using the ‘pro-wrestling effect’, writes Corto Blommaert in de Volkskrant. “Trump voters don’t have to believe him, as long as they pay attention to him.” I enjoyed this piece and the parallel Blommaert draws with the methods of the absurd WWE billionaire Vince McMahon, who has recently come under fire due to all sorts of allegations.
Thanks for reading! Are you already a subscriber?