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Throughout 2016 we’ve featured oral history #OriginStories – tales of how people from all walks of life found their way into the world of oral history and what keeps them going. Most recently, Steven Sielaff explained how oral history has enabled him to connect his love of technology and his desire to create history.

The post In the oral history toolbox appeared first on OUPblog.

Let’s just say I decided to expand upon that post I wrote about a month ago on Manga Bookshelf and took my adventure to New York Comic Con. For better or worse. Give a listen to publishers and fans on why they think it’s worth it to buy manga, and you can share, in however ... Read more

Just to prove I'm still drawing things, here's a decorated envelope for one of Stuart's Russian-connection friends.


And here's the best non-handmade card I've had this Christmas, from James and Asako, which isn't even a Christmas card, really, but is just so fabulous:




And thanks to all you fab comics makers at the James Allen's Preperatory School, you ladies rock.



Cool thing, I just heard from Amanda Rigler that you can now listen to most of the talks at the Women in Comics conference in Cambridge. Yay! The only hitch is that most of the talks came with extensive slideshows, but even without the visuals, you can still get a pretty good idea of what was being talked about, by Woodrow Phoenix & Corinne Pearlman, Asia Alfasi, Kate Evans, Dominique Goblet and others. (Here's the direct link to my talk, Comics and Picture Books: women bridging the gap.)

One of the books I refer to is my studio mate Viviane Schwarz's There are Cats in this Book, which you can look at online here!

I get very squeamish listening to my own voice: it sounds so choppy, I babble, I have a weird hybrid accent, and you can shoot me if I keep saying the word 'really' three times in every sentence. (I think I was trying to be emphatic or something. Really, Sarah!)

I once took a class at U Penn with my friend Brynn to try to make our voices sound better. It turned out to be a class about how to get rid of your Philadelphia accent, which neither of us had, but then it was so interesting listening to these really strong Philly accents that we kept going to the class anyway. This one woman had the deepest, richest voice I'd ever heard, and she totally hated it. It was fun to see how she went from disliking her voice because it was so unusual to realising it was actually totally amazing. I never got to hear her sing, which was a great pity.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  In the post below he looks at the end of 60’s Brit-Pop.

Tucked into a tight lane off busy Wardour Street in London’s Soho district, the Beatles gathered on 31 July 1968 to begin something they had done only a few times previously: record outside the safe confines of EMI’s Recording Studios in Abbey Road. They had grown increasingly dissatisfied with EMI’s reluctance to invest in competitive equipment, while bands like the Rolling Stones and the Who had been recording in American studios for years. These bands flocked to Los Angeles both because of the recording culture and because of technology that EMI had postponed installing: eight-track recording decks instead of the four-track decks common in British studios. When the Beatles arrived at Soho’s Trident Studios for “Hey Jude,” they intended to add vocals to their EMI four-track recording of the musical backing. However, when they heard playback on the eight-track Ampex decks through Trident’s sound system, they immediately relegated the first tape as rehearsal and began working anew.

Trident had its problems. Principally, the owners, the Sheffield Brothers, had simply plugged American machines that ran on an alternating current of sixty-cycles into the British fifty-cycle system, resulting in slower playback at a lower pitch. Any pitched overdubs that the Beatles would have tried over their original EMI recording would have been hopelessly out-of-tune. But over the next few days, the Beatles would re-record the backing track to “Hey Jude,” add vocals, and play with musical possibilities that eight tracks allowed. The new environment may have expanded their musical options, but it also amplified personality quirks and irritated old wounds. In particular, Paul McCartney antagonized his old friends through his preoccupation with perfection and his predilection for prodding his colleagues to improve their product. The first casualty was Ringo Starr who quit the band on 22 August, returning only in early September after tempers had cooled.

The London recording and music industries were beginning to evolve under the combined influences of their relatively sudden international success and the growth of independent studios like Trident. In September of 1968, as “Hey Jude” rose to the top of British and American record charts, the infrastructure that had grown to produce hundreds of British pop recordings underwent a sudden revolution. The session musicians, music directors, producers, songwriters, and engineers who had generated the diverse array of British pop, rock, and blues recordings under the cover of touring bands like Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, Them, and the Yardbirds felt the system shudder.

“Hey Jude” describes the break-up of John Lennon’s marriage to Cynthia and its effects on their son Julian. Moreover, the inordinately long recording (over seven minutes) reflects McCartney’s interest in hymn-like musical structures (e.g., “Let It Be”) and serves as a requiem for the musical world that the Beatles had helped to define. Just as “Hey Jude” rose in international sales charts, a London trade paper, the New Musical Express, reported that two longstanding London session musicians had formed the “New Yardbirds.” Jimmy Page had established himself as a free-lance producer and John Paul Jones had demonstrated his skills as a music director. But, as technology and its availability transformed the industry, they saw their opportunity to leave the safety of session life. Thus, in the waning months of 1968, British recording engineers left for America, session musicians and music directors went on tours, and the old studios scrambled to stay competitive. The New Yardbirds, who soon renamed themselves Led Zeppelin, launched their mystical macho imperative into the seventies while the Beatles celebrated the end of sixties British pop by making a sad song sound better.

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