AUSTINKLEON.COM : BLOG + TUMBLR

NyTimes : THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER : A Division...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:37:24 -0800

NyTimes : THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER : A Division Through Time

A really wonderful interactive page that uses photos taken from the same vantage point and a cool slider to see how spaces in Berlin have changed since the wall fell.

My Wife The Architect reminds me that Stewart Brand advocates for this kind of comparison (without the cool web technology) in HOW BUILDINGS LEARN.

FUN FUN FUN FEST 2009

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:14:38 -0800

Let’s get something straight: I hate music festivals. I don’t dig on big crowds, standing around for extended periods of time, port-o-johns, and overpriced beer. All that said, Fun Fun Fun Fest is a pretty awesome time. I made it a record 6 hours yesterday, and even got inspired to doodle a few index cards here and there. Once it got dark, and I couldn’t see anymore, I headed home.

I won’t be going back today, because I have a ton to do, and I like my health and my sanity. (If next year, FFF Fest wants to provide me with a lawn chair and a good view, I’d be happy to doodle away all day.) Yes, I know I’m giving up the chance of a lifetime to draw Danzig. So it goes.

Death came out onstage in monk costumes:

Crazy-loud metal band, The Sword:

LOCAL MUSIC IS SEXY

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:46:52 -0800

Friday night the Austinist folks had me out to draw their Local Music Is Sexy pre-party for Fun Fun Fun Fest. Music + cupcakes + booze = a magic formula. My favorite moment was TV Torso covering The Wipers’ “Over The Edge.” You can hear an MP3 of them doing it in the studio if you head over to Paige Maguire’s blog. (Thanks, Paige, for inviting me!)

Note: click any of the drawings to see them bigger.

Ted Leo = Glenn Danzig

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:05:19 -0800

Ted Leo = Glenn Danzig:

So awesome.

"We’re a hill country band."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:14:00 -0800

“We’re a hill country band.”

- White Denim, performing live on The Current

“Just imagine yourself back in [the 1700s], sailing in a Spanish...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:59:00 -0800

“Just imagine yourself back in [the 1700s], sailing in a Spanish galleon on the Caribbean… you look out and notice another ship in the distance. When you peer through the microscope to get a better look at that ship, you see a flag flying. As it gets closer, you can make out what’s on the flag – a skull and crossbones. As soon as you see that symbol, you know exactly what kind of an experience is in store for you… [the pirate flag] was a brand promise… and the promise was: You’re f****d.”

—Brian Collins quoted in Warren Berger’s Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World

(via)

artistspaid: britticisms: Arthur Russell

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:07:30 -0800

artistspaid:

britticisms:

Arthur Russell

Dan Chaon's index cards and how other writers write

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:59:00 -0800

Dan Chaon's index cards and how other writers write: Note how many of these writers use index cards, collage, their hands. My friend Dan:

Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.

His most recent novel, “Await Your Reply,” which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.

During the early stages of writing, he carries a pocketful of cards with him wherever he goes; as they accumulate, he stores them in a card catalogue that he bought at a library sale. It often takes two years before something resembling a novel takes shape. He eventually transcribes the cards onto the computer and writes furiously from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.

"Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:47:43 -0800

““Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to…””

- George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

My twitter feed yesterday.

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:20:50 -0800

My twitter feed yesterday.

TEA DRAWINGS

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:30:57 -0800

Tea bag + index card + ink

See more tea drawings

“Let Them Sing It For You” is a sound art project by...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:27:00 -0800

“Let Them Sing It For You” is a sound art project by Erik Bunger

By typing in a text of any kind you can get it sung for you by some of the world’s greatest pop stars. A database of sung words has been built up and is supposed to be gradually growing through the users’ own interaction. If you find a word missing in our sound vocabulary, just tell us, and we will extract the word from a song of your choice, and add it to our database.

So cool. I spent hours doing this kind of thing with SoundForge for our college radio show. I plan on using this “Newspaper Blackout” clip for future videos…

William Shatner Performs Poetic Reading of Levi Johnston’s...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:14:00 -0800

William Shatner Performs Poetic Reading of Levi Johnston’s Tweets

Learn to play “Fake Empire” and “Slow...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:06:27 -0800

Learn to play “Fake Empire” and “Slow Show” during a private guitar lesson with Aaron Dessner of The National (via)

Ringo dancing to “Money.” Would love to know the...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:13:00 -0800

Ringo dancing to “Money.” Would love to know the name of the band playing. Pretty sure it’s not Barrett Strong.

Dash Shaw, "Teach House Styles"

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:59:19 -0800

Dash Shaw, "Teach House Styles":

What Shaw is really getting at here is using constraints in the classroom. Instead of cartooning whatever you feel like, draw an Archie strip. It would hold equal weight in a creative writing class. Instead of writing whatever you want, write a horror story.

Personal style and originality would be put on hold. In our current cult of originality, the pressure is to have a personal style as soon as possible, and the classroom environments often have this mentality as well. Everyone is freaking out: “What’s my style? What’s my thing?” It’s too much too fast. This race for originality has, over the years, spread from that future-goal timeline to just after college to (now) inside college itself. A safety zone no longer exists. For the most part, hardly anyone is hiring newbies fresh out of college to draw in a house style and then expect them to grow out of it. If these classes are explicitly devoted to learning a specific form, the anxiety for uniqueness would disappear and everyone would breathe out and look at their comics. The college would be the safety zone and after they graduate they’d start doing their own thing.

Yes, yes, yes. And even more importantly, don’t teach tools.

There would be no courses devoted to “tools,” no penciling or inking classes. People can learn that elsewhere, like in their foundation year drawing classes. When that separation of responsibilities is brought into the cartooning class it’s usually based on an American production model that leads to people struggling with a tool for a whole year when they’re naturally suited to something else.

How To Use An Apostrophe

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:52:25 -0800

How To Use An Apostrophe

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:41:57 -0800

The importance of stupidity in scientific research:

I call it “not-knowing.”

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

A tiny home tour: living in 96 square feetAt the end you find...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:10:00 -0800

A tiny home tour: living in 96 square feet

At the end you find out this dude lives in a *500* square foot house with his wife and baby. Personally, I think it’s nuts, but it would make a helluva man cave on wheels…

Lux Lotus's Seven Rules For Style

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:27:35 -0800

Lux Lotus's Seven Rules For Style:

I like this list. Currently thinking about giving away a bunch of clothes just because, as rule #1 says, I don’t feel good in them.

WEIRD NAME

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:30:14 -0800

It’s Austin like the city, Kleon rhymes with neon…

The Believer - Interview with Peter Blegvad

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:27:33 -0800

The Believer - Interview with Peter Blegvad:

Great interview with a cartoonist/songwriter I’m ashamed to admit I had no previous knowledge of. Love what he says here about the (lack of) difference between writing songs and cartoons:

For decades I’d flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others. These days I’m less supple and more entrenched, so it’s a wrench to switch. But writing and drawing a Leviathan strip, say, isn’t all that different from composing a song. They both involve a text embedded in another medium. My father, Erik Blegvad, is an illustrator—he’s at work on his 107th title—and my mother, Lenore, was (she died last September) an author/illustrator/painter, so this symbiosis seems perfectly natural to me. My favorite artists, Marcel Duchamp being perhaps the paradigm, deliberately flouted the decree that art must not be “literary.” The musical heroes of my youth were John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Captain Beefheart, all of whom drew/wrote/painted when they weren’t composing/performing/recording. I recently learned the word liminal: “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” That’s where I feel most at home, for better or worse.

leviathan by peter blegvad

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:01:13 -0800

leviathan by peter blegvad

Todd Klein’s hand lettering (via)

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:02:37 -0800

Todd Klein’s hand lettering (via)

HI, HOW ARE YOU?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:33:17 -0800

From an article about the Daniel Johnston iPhone game.

THE COMMANDMENT

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:01:11 -0800

Spotted yesterday at the Texas State Capitol. Couldn’t resist.

Taken with my iPhone camera, blasphemed with iRetouch, filtered w/ Tilt-shift generator.

See more de-signs.

GEOGRAPHY IS NO LONGER OUR MASTER

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:45:27 -0800

I grew up in a small town. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hang out with artists. All I wanted to do was get the heck out of southern Ohio and get someplace where something was happening.

Now I live in Austin, Texas. A pretty hip place. Tons of artists and creative types everywhere.

And you know what? I’d say that 90% of my mentors and peers don’t live here. They live on the internet. Which is to say, most of my thinking and talking and art-related fellowship is online.

Instead of a geographical art scene, I have Twitter buddies and Google Reader.

Life is weird.

CONTEXTOMY : QUOTING OUT OF CONTEXT

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:06:52 -0800

from The New Yorker’s profile of Wes Anderson

New word (for me) via Wikipedia:

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as “quoting out of context”. The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter’s decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become “context” by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, historian Milton Mayer coined the term “contextomy” to describe its use by Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi broadsheet Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany. To arouse anti-semitic sentiments among the weekly’s working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder. Although rarely employed to this malicious extreme, contextomy is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and studies have demonstrated that the effects of this misrepresentation can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, quote.

In other words, how I make all my art.

HANDS END (AND A MAP OF DE-SIGNS)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:30:44 -0700

Happy Friday. All taken with my iPhone camera, altered in iRetouch, and filtered through Tilt-Shift Generator or Camerabag.

And in case you’re a maps geek like me, I’ve geo-tagged all these signs so you can see them on a map:

(Right now it just shows you how geographically small my life is–the dots west of 35 are where I work, and the dots east of 35 are where I live.)

See more De-Signs.

TEXAS IS ACTUALLY REAL

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:28:22 -0700

Huge thanks to everyone who entered the print giveaway! Y’all left so many nice comments, I was kind of overwhelmed. I realized that the way I worded it made it sound like the nicer the comment, the better your chance of winning (which was not true–I picked randomly!) So basically, I extorted y’all for praise. Apologies! We’re definitely going to have more giveaways in the near future, so stay tuned!

Congrats to the winner, Matt Wilson (@matt_wilson), a dad and marketing fella from Minnesota. Your print will be on the way shortly, Matt!

For those of you who didn’t win, don’t forget that 20×200 is still selling CHEAP blackout poem prints. Buy one!