AUSTIN KLEON

AC/DC, High Voltage, 1976 Allmusic: Rockers never got quite...

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:39:30 -0500

AC/DC, High Voltage, 1976

Rockers never got quite as dirty as Bon Scott. Scott sounded as if you could catch a disease by listening to him. He sounded like the gateman at hell, somebody who never hid the notion that lurking behind the door are some bad, dangerous things, but they’re also fun, too, and he made no apologies for that. But for as primal as High Voltage is, it’s also a lot weirder and funnier than it’s given credit for, too…

Make bad art.

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:29:04 -0500

Neil Gaiman has released a book of his great commencement address, Make Good Art.

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

I love Gaiman’s message, but I also want to make a plug for something else: when the going gets rough, make bad art, too.

When 9/11 and Katrina hit and she lost a bunch of her close friends, Lynda Barry got really depressed, and all she could do is doodle:

I found myself compelled, like this weird, shameful compulsion to draw cute animals. That was all I could stand to draw. You know, just cry and draw cute animals…dancing dogs with crowns on, you know? And, like, really friendly ducks. But I found this monkey, this meditating monkey, and I found that once - when I drew that monkey, it’s not that it fixed the problem. But it did shift it a little bit, or provide me some kind of relief. And that’s when I started to think, maybe that’s what images do, because I believe in all my - with all my heart they have an absolute biological function…

“Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Make art.

“What I drew today” by Wendy MacNaughton cf. Craighton...

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:50:00 -0500

“What I drew today” by Wendy MacNaughton

cf. Craighton Berman’s “The Campaign for the Accurate Measurement of Creativity”

The Zine Revolution Joshua Glenn writes about one of the first...

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:27:58 -0500

The Zine Revolution

Joshua Glenn writes about one of the first zines he ever read, published by his friends at school in 1985:

what impressed me most about The Mark of Cain is how it inspired a thuggish football player to punch John in the mouth… because the guy (correctly) assumed that the message “Diana, will you please shut the kindly fuck up” inscribed onto one of the zine’s pages was a reference to his girlfriend. John and I were co-editors of the school’s literary magazine, which inspired no such visceral reactions! Not that I wanted to be punched in the mouth, but in some inchoate way I realized then and there that literary publishing would never provide me with the kind of immediate, personal feedback loop I craved.

(Glenn co-edited the book Significant Objects with my friend, Rob Walker.

“There are no stats programs here. There is no like button.”

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:52:00 -0500

Michele Catalano writes about moving back to her blog hosted at her original domain, not because Yahoo bought Tumblr, but because she wants to get away from the likes/reblogs as validation trap:

For as long as I have wanted to be a writer – and that’s about 40 long years – there was never any part of that dream that included obsessively checking a page of statistics and judging my self worth by the numbers within. I always wrote for the sheer pleasure of it, from putting that first word down to finishing the final edit, writing has always been a labor of love. Recently, it had become just a labor.

So here I am back at my old domain, the one where I started writing publicly (ok, blogging) in 2001, the one where I started telling my stories to the world. I’m taking the majority of my writing away from tumblr, away from the hearts and reblogs, away from the instant validation. I don’t want to labor anymore. I want to love what I write. I want to love why I write.

There are no stats programs here. There is no like button. I will have no idea how many people will read each post. But I will write and I will learn to love to write again.

I was chatting with Michele on Twitter, and she said, “For the first couple of years I blogged I had no idea how many readers I had. And I was better off for it.” It reminded me of Greil Marcus, talking about the early days of Rolling Stone, when they said, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t.”

thinkleftandthinkright: “Newspaper Blackout” by Austin Kleon I...

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:41:50 -0500

thinkleftandthinkright:

“Newspaper Blackout” by Austin Kleon

I happen to own this book and I thought I would recommend it to you all for some inspiration and/or laughs.

Hey, thanks for sharing! Y’all can get your own copy here.

—AK

"The perfect balance is committing to only those crafts that you can perform with satisfaction even..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:52:00 -0500

“The perfect balance is committing to only those crafts that you can perform with satisfaction even if you have to do so in utter obscurity. Then, put your work out in public as part of the process itself—if you’re making homebrew beer or an Arduino hack, make a video or write about the process as a means to think harder about the details of it. If you’re a writer, think of putting it online as simply having the work backed up in one more place. In this way, you open yourself up to the spectrum of possibilities, ranging from utter obscurity at one end to global fame at the other. Far more likely is something closer to the obscurity end but much more satisfying—that you will draw the attention of a relative few who share your interests.”

- Adam Gurri basically writes my book for me

"Some of the most consistent innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters...."

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:22:00 -0500

“Some of the most consistent innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters. [Think of] the diabolical creativity of Nazi Germany, which was the first country to use ballistic missiles, jet fighter planes, assault rifles, and countless other weapons. And yet nobody wanted to add Peenemünde, where the Germans developed the V-2 rocket during the 1940s, to the glorious list of creative hothouses that includes Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Belle Époque Paris, and latter-day Austin, Texas.”

- Thomas Frank on the bullshittery of the “creativity” industry (Thx, jndevereux!)

Death stops the manuscript. (via)

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:03:00 -0500

Death stops the manuscript. (via)

"As a parent, your job from the minute your child is born is to create an exit ramp away from you."

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:53:02 -0500

“As a parent, your job from the minute your child is born is to create an exit ramp away from you.”

- Beth Greenspan, talking about Mary Karr’s “Entering the Kingdom”

The Breeders, LSXX The Breeders have released a 20th...

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:46:13 -0500

The Breeders, LSXX

The Breeders have released a 20th anniversary reissue of their 1993 album, Last Splash. Lindsay Zoladz did a nice writeup on Pitchfork:

Before they could legally drink, the Deal twins, armed with one guitar and two mics, were fixtures in the scuzziest bars of Dayton, Ohio, where legend has it their salty-sweet harmonies could make even the motorcycle dudes cry. The year was 1978, maybe ‘79. Like the bikers, Kim and Kelley listened Hank Williams and the Everly Brothers; when Kelley was 16 she watched The Song Remains the Same on acid and the souvenir she kept from her trip was this dead-serious conviction that she wanted to be Jimmy Page. Other people’s songs were too hard to figure out, so they made up their own. Nobody else would play with them (Kim: “This is Dayton, Ohio. You know the NGA kids: No Girls Allowed. Motherfuckers.”), so they played with themselves. The angel-voiced twins kept booking scuzzy bar gigs and kept writing songs with no greater ambition than staving off boredom. “There was no scene,” Kelley recalled years later, “You made up your own fun.”

Filed under: The Breeders

ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process Art Work reveals...

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:19:10 -0500

ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process

Art Work reveals the artistic notetaking habits of an astonishing range of artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, and other creators by granting rare access to the journal pages and other visual materials they use to capture and foster their work.

From Sasha Frere-Jones’ forward:

As artists, we often prefer the note to the final product; it is an object that is ours alone, free of explanatory fuss and ornament. A mundane list next to three pages of earnestly revised text—shouldn’t we have published it just like that?

From Ivan Vartanian’s introduction, the distinction between journal and notebook:

Where the journal is meant to serve as a daily (or intermittent) record of observations and reflections on a life and its experiences, the notebook is meant as a place of work—for solving problems, jotting an idea, figuring a sequence, determining a position, shaping a phrase. Where the journal documents the life of its owner, the notebook documents the life of an artwork or artistic process.

Here’s Tony Kushner, talking about writing by hand:

Most of my best ideas have not been things that I knew I had in my head. I’ve been surprised by them…and it’s always the case that if you just start moving words around on a piece of paper…if you start limbering up your fingers and get going, you will find your way in.

And Richard Hell:

Notebooks, it seems to me sometimes, are the ultimate art form… Notebooks might be as good as art gets in our time.

(images via grain edit)

"That’s the anguish of [writing]. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that."

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:19:59 -0500

““That’s the anguish of [writing]. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that.””

- James Baldwin (via theparisreview)

creativemornings: Woohoo! The moment you have all been waiting...

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:31:24 -0500

creativemornings:

Woohoo! The moment you have all been waiting for.. the very first CreativeMornings/Austin talk is now live online!

The speaker is none other than Austin Kleon, the force behind Steal Like an Artist and Newspaper Blackout. Austin speaks on April’s theme of the future, by attempting to set the ground rules for future discussions between artists and designers—in terms of how we discuss our work and process.

“I think we’re living in this mass fetishization of creativity,” he says. “And you can tell that from the way we use ‘creative’ as a noun.” He goes on to breakdown some of his previous advice: Do Good Work and Share It With People, on what is good, what is work, and how we should share.

Excellent talk. Watch it here.

A transcription and the slides from the talk are here.

"Whenever you work with someone who you idolize, you realize … he’s just a person trying to make a..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:43:15 -0500

“Whenever you work with someone who you idolize, you realize … he’s just a person trying to make a movie as best he knows how and that doesn’t look so different from other people trying to do the same thing. And he’s wildly smart and brilliant and funny, but it’s moviemaking and there’s something kind of democratic about how difficult it is because everybody — whether you’re Woody Allen or Noah or P.T. Anderson — it’s hard. Making movies is a hard thing and it’s slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.”

- Greta Gerwig on working with Woody Allen

Karen Green, Bough Down Maggie Nelson has it covered: The...

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:28:31 -0500

Karen Green, Bough Down

Maggie Nelson has it covered:

The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green…

Upon first read, Bough Down feels disorienting and surreal — like entering a drugged wormhole of grief, pills, and barely tolerable engrams and emotions, which appear via allegory, hallucination, synecdoche, and blur. Upon rereading, however, the bones of the book’s structure become admirably clear.

My favorite passage:

I take your parents to the lighthouse, I do. There is nothing but September fog to cover our shame, and your father laughs just like you, at the opacity. I want to eat the laugh, I want to rub it on my chest like camphor, I want to make a sound tattoo. I also want to bash these two small people together and see if a collision of DNA will give me my life back.

In the morning, my wife pointed out our son didn’t have kneecaps yet, and later that night I read this line: “I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down.”

Filed under: my reading year 2013

Black Sabbath - Live In Paris, December 20, 1970, Olympia...

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:13:00 -0500

Black Sabbath - Live In Paris, December 20, 1970, Olympia Theater

Goodness gracious. @jndevereux sent me this set of Sabbath in their prime. It’s a bootleg, so unfortunately, it’s not available commercially, but just google “sabbath live in paris” and there are all kinds of rips.

Setlist:

00:00 Introduction
01:51 Paranoid
05:00 Hand Of Doom
11:52 Rat Salad
13:15 Iron Man
19:40 Black Sabbath
29:19 Intermission
31:13 N.I.B.
36:45 Behind The Wall Of Sleep
42:40 War Pigs
51:00 Fairies Wear Boots

Filed under: Sabbath

"The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:54:27 -0500

“The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.”

- Logan Pearsall Smith (via)

Blackwing Palamino pencils Clive Thompson got me totally hooked...

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:50:00 -0500

Blackwing Palamino pencils

Clive Thompson got me totally hooked on these: they’re super soft and dark, which makes them awesome for marginalia and writing longhand. You can also buy a badass longpoint sharpener for them.

HERE IS TODAY An interactive art/science HTML5 site...

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:42:40 -0500

HERE IS TODAY

An interactive art/science HTML5 site illustrating the scale of time on Earth.

In case you needed reminding of your insignificance.

(thx gwenda)