Austin Kleon

A day of zines

It rained all morning yesterday, so I took the 5-year-old into the garage with me, made him a blank booklet, gave him a stack of NYTimes magazines, and let him go. Here’s what he made (with a little glue help from papa):









A few hours later, we headed over to Staple. We bumped into Katia Lara, who praised I Hurt (she’d just seen it on my Instagram!) and let us check out her skull:

Then we checked out the screenprinting station:

And a lecture on zines by Maria Heg, who co-heads Zine Fest Houston. This slide of zinester Martin Luther got a big laugh from O:

And Heg actually made a one-page zine live for the audience:

Now I’m gonna leave a copy of Whatcha Mean, What’s A Zine? lying around for him to find, and maybe we’ll hit the APL zine rack soon…

Filed under: zines

Our portion of the infinite

This morning we debated whether to walk out in the rain or stay in the house with the boys. We chose the rain and were rewarded.

It’s almost spooky how many days my daily reading of Thoreau’s journal syncs up perfectly with my mood. (As he wrote, we receive what we’re ready to receive.) September 7, 1851:

We are receiving our portion of the infinite… I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it.

The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most life. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business….

I am convinced that men are not well employed, that this is not the way to spend a day. If by patience, if by watching, I can secure one new ray of light, can feel myself elevated for an instant… shall I not be a watchman henceforth?

Always drawing

I took this photo of our 3-year-old’s setup in our hotel room in Chicago. (I had to run to the local Target after two days to buy a new ream of paper.)

Here’s half a day’s worth of drawings on our kitchen floor. My wife sweeps them all up into a big pile at the end of the day.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the 3-year-old loves drawing skeletons, but refuses to watch Coco. He still refuses to watch it, but he’s now discovered the Coco coloring book, so many of his skeletons now play guitar. (I’m reminded, now, of the genius of merchandising: hook ’em through coloring books first…)

He does this new thing where when he makes a particularly good line, he’ll stand back and pull his arms to his side and just shake in excitement. It’s infectious, watching a tiny person draw this much. And humbling. Back to work, papa.

Inspiring diaries

Duncan Hannah, diary

 

I’m devouring Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies right now. My only gripe with the book is you don’t get a sense for how wonderfully visual his notebooks were.

Owen Kleon, diary

 

More inspiration came this morning, courtesy of my 5-year-old’s diary. (Everything on that page after the words “as usual” is invented.)

I keep a huge file of inspiring notebooks on my tumblr, which I relied on when making The Steal Like An Artist Journal. Here’s a slideshow talk I gave a few years back with some of the highlights:

See also: Diary of a 5-year-old.

The morning of our lives

We took a great walk beside Lake Michigan this morning and when I came back to shower Jonathan Richman’s “The Morning of Our Lives” came on my shuffle mix:

Our time is now,
we can do anything
we really believe in

Our time is now
here in the morning
of our lives

This song has been of great comfort to me lately. (A lot of Richman’s songs comfort me — “That Summer Feeling,” “City vs. Country,” “Dignified and Old,” etc.)

The Strokes used the song as their opening music on their first tour. Here’s Rob Sheffield in Meet Me In The Bathroom:

…but just the end of it, where Jonathan’s saying, “We’re young now . . . now’s the time . . . to have faith in what we can do.” The Strokes just played the final minute of the song as their entrance music. It was so unbelievably exciting. It was the kind of moment that made me grateful to be alive.

If you put it on a playlist, it sounds really good followed by “Modern Age.”

Page-turner

From this morning’s diary. (Not totally sure it’s true.)

The cruelest month

“Summer gets to be an old story.”
—Henry David Thoreau

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but in Austin, Texas, it’s September. Summer is winter here, and summer isn’t even officially over until September 22. The cursed sun pays no heed to anything official. You’re not out of the A/C until Halloween at the earliest. September here is just a cruel joke. When Northern Instagram fills with scarves and pumpkin spice lattes, your only solace is shorts in February. (Awful in its own way.) “Hot and sunny every day,” Bill Hicks mocked. “What are you, a fucking lizard? Only reptiles feel that way about this kind of weather.” It’s nothing right or natural. Nothing to be celebrated. Only endured.

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