Austin Kleon

Beyond survival mode

There’s a turn in Dougal Robertson’s Survive The Savage Sea that really touched me. It comes on the family’s 25th day as castaways: the sea calms down and there’s a “glorious sunset and a peacefulness of the spirit.” The group takes turns singing songs to each other. And then:

I felt that we had already gone beyond thinking in terms of survival. We had started living from the sea as an adapted way of life… we no longer thought of rescue as one of the main objectives of our existence; we were no longer subject to the daily disappointment of a lonely vigil, to the idea that help might be at hand or was necessary. We no longer had that helpless feeling of dependence on others for our continued existence. We were alone, and stood alone, inhabitants of the savage sea.

Nina Katchadourian talks about how much of the book (her favorite) is really about what it’s like to be a family, and I think that’s why this scene touched me so deeply.

There are moments with children, even in a boring, safe, suburban existence like mine, where you just feel like you’re in Survival Mode. And every once in a while it lifts and you feel like you’ve moved beyond just surviving, and you feel like you’re actually living. The children eat their food. You all tell stories and laugh. Books after tubs with no whining. You’re a quartet, and you’re all performing the same music.

The reasons these evenings are so wonderful is because they are so rare, and in such stark contrast to those Survival Mode days, when you’re just trying to get rid of the day as well as you can.

I’m now thinking about a passage that comes later in the “Analysis” section, when Robertson offers his thoughts on surviving in castaway situations:

If any single civilized factor in a castaway’s character helps survival, it is a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. It helps the castaway to laugh in the face of impossible situations and allows him, or her, to overcome the assassination of all civilized codes and characteristics which hitherto had been the guidelines of life.

“A well-developed sense of the ridiculous”—I cannot think of a better trait for a parent!

You do not have to be good

Words to live by. (From chapter 5 of Keep Going)

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Here she is reading it:

She grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, about a half hour southeast of where I’m typing this. When she gave a (rare) reading in Cleveland, she joked, “I have to read ‘Wild Geese’ or I shall be chased from the city.”

She said she wrote it while in Cleveland, trying to coax a student to practice the end stop lines technique. “You write one and I’ll write one,” she offered, resulting in “Wild Geese.”

Later in the reading she was asked what it takes to be a poet.

“Read a lot of poetry; find poetry you really love. Don’t be afraid to imitate it. That’s how we learn most everything in the world — love and imitation. The second part is to seek primary sources, to go out into the world. Go to the art museum, yes, but go out into the forest, too. Pay attention to the world.”

This really is the great message of her work: Pay attention. And pay attention to what you pay attention to. (The message of most great art, really.)

It’s spelled out in her poem, “Sometimes”:

It’s there in “A Summer Day”:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

It’s there in “When Death Comes”:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

I think she did it right. And showed us how we can, too.

The opening page of The Steal Like An Artist Journal, painted by Heather Champ

The teachings and the teacher

Yesterday some friends and I (all dudes — this detail will matter later) were discussing the art of acting. None of us are actors, but we all like movies, and we were wondering where a layman might go to figure out what acting is about, what “good” acting is, etc.

One of my pals brought up my drawings of Jeffrey Tambor’s acting workshops.  We attended them together at SXSW 2010 and SXSW 2012. Two of my favorite events to draw. Tambor was funny and wise and I found myself reciting some of his lines for years after. (One piece of advice in particular has stuck with me: “Worrying is not preparation.”)

In 2014, my pal @mattthomas attended one of his lectures and tweeted out his notes. I copied notes from his notes:

Tambor’s morning routine: – wakes up and drinks a cold cup of coffee that’s next to the bed from the night before – reads for a half hour

Tambor: “You wanna have a good life? Work, love, and thrive with people who get you.”

Tambor: “If you’re any good, you’re going to be fired.”

Tambor talking about how he used to, in his darker moments, destroy his projects with worry.

That third bit reads a lot differently today, given Tambor’s firing from Transparent.

I think about this old, old problem all the time now: What happens to the good teachings of men when those men do bad things?

I don’t care about the men themselves. They may or may not get what they deserve. (I’m getting too old for heroes, anyways, and celebrities, actors, comedians, they’re people, yes, but they’re also projections.) I am, selfishly, yes, thinking about what I have taken from them. How perhaps-not-so-good-in-hindsight men have helped me become a better man. What does one do with that knowledge?

“Worrying is not preparation” has long become a mantra in our house — it’s helped us through some bad, bad days. (It is not lost on me that this wisdom was gathering in an acting workshop — a place where you go to learn about pretending to be something, performing a role.) What do we do with it now?

Different people have different answers. And I have mine: “Worrying is not preparation” belongs to me now. As a phrase or a unit of meaning, a meme, or whatever, it has, by being used by me and my partner, become ours. Its usefulness has made it ours.

It’s like they say in A.A. and Leon sang in The Band: “Take what you need and leave the rest.”

The need I will take is the teaching. The rest I will leave is the teacher.

In the meantime, I will keep looking for and learning from better men, or better yet, better women.

A good time to be a pack rat

Edward Gorey’s salt shaker collection
Edward Gorey’s salt shaker collection

Marie Kondo mania is in full swing again thanks to her Netflix special. I haven’t watched the show yet, but I read her book at the beginning of 2016, and wrote two posts in 2017 on the connections between messiness and creativity — “Tidying Up” and “The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for.” They eventually became chapter 8 (“When in doubt, tidy up”) of Keep Going, which begins:

(If you want the rest, you’ll have to pre-order the book.)

Thinking back to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, what disturbed me most — as a writer and an artist — was the idea that how you feel NOW in this very moment is the most important factor in whether you should keep or discard something.

Books are the obvious example (already covered here), so let’s take photographs: Kondo says to keep a certain amount of photos from an event, and toss the rest. And yet, I recently looked through a box of loose photos from my wedding, and I found all kinds of interesting photos that didn’t interest me when I was putting together our wedding album.

You’ve probably experienced something similar: A photo you didn’t think was interesting at the time, later on you find it more interesting than the stuff you chose to frame. My friend Clayton Cubitt once tweeted something along the same lines:

I realize that nowhere does Kondo explicitly say this, but there is a kind of anti-collecting streak in the book. Most artists are collectors, if not hoarders, and we don’t just collect the things that “spark joy”: we collect things (objects yes, but also hunches and ideas) that we’re unsure or ambivalent about. Things we get the feeling we could use later.

It tickled me recently to read this piece, “Edward Gorey, Pack Rat”:

When he wasn’t writing, drawing, illustrating, and designing—and even when he was—Edward Gorey was collecting. Over the course of his life, the artist gathered, and kept, everything from tarot cards to trilobites to particularly interesting cheese graters. “We ask the docents not to use the word ‘hoarder,’” says Hischak, grinning as he surveys the House’s newest exhibit, which focuses on Gorey’s pack rat tendencies. “But he really did hoard interesting things.”

I suspect that, like Gorey, every creative person has just a tiny bit of a pack rat in them. (I like that Gorey referred to his collecting as “accumulating.”)

It may be a bad time to be a pack rat, but it’s also a good time: CNN reports that Goodwill donations are way up. So “Get in, Losers, We’re Going Thrifting.”

This is a chord, this is another

“I just learned ‘Imagine’ on the piano,” tweeted @acupoftea yesterday, “and I would like to officially rescind any energy I’ve spent being impressed with people who can play ‘Imagine’ on the piano.” I chuckled, and then she followed up with, “If you want to demystify pop music, learn, like, four chords and just play them in a different order & rhythm each time.”

That immediately made me think of the famous zine graphic above, included in the book Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-1980. Toby Mott explains:

[It’s] an illustration from a fanzine called Sideburn #1, which was a drawing made by Tony Moon just to fill the space. It’s a drawing of three guitar chords and it says, ‘now form a band’. That fanzine is extremely rare, but the drawing is often quoted by lots of musicians as the impetus to do something, and it’s seen as a key message of punk,” says Toby. “You didn’t need to have been to music school or be particularly proficient or skilled. It was much more about the energy and drive to do something. It’s a rallying call to the troops.

Nice to know the story behind a drawing that always puzzled me. Why are the markings on the frets and not in between them? And why A-E-G? What songs can you even play with those chords? (Answer: AC/DC’s “TNT” and T-Rex’s “Bang A Gong.”)

Midnight plane to Houston

Jim Weatherly with Gladys Knight & the Pips in 1973

Here is one of my favorite examples in pop music of how a pretty decent song can be made into an absolute classic.

In 1970, a songwriter named Jim Weatherly called his buddy on the phone. He wasn’t home, but his girlfriend, this woman named Farrah Fawcett, answered the phone. Weatherly chatted with her a bit and Fawcett said she was packing for a “midnight plane to Houston.” He thought that sounded like a good title for a song, and wrote and recorded this:

Now, no offense to Jim Weatherly, but this track makes me want to slit my wrists. The bones are there, but it’s just not quite right. (As an aside, that line, “I’d rather live in her world than live without her in mine”? Dang.)

Well, Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mom!) heard something in it, even though when she went to record her version in 1973, she had to make a few changes.

“My people are originally from Georgia,” she said later, “and they didn’t take planes to Houston or anywhere else. They took trains.”

She asked permission from Weatherly and he said, “Change anything but the writer and publisher.”

Now we’re getting somewhere! Note how better it is with the gender switched and Houston’s pipes. (That moanful harmonica is a bit much for me.)

Weatherly’s publisher then sent Gladys Knight and The Pips the track. And with producer Tony Camillo, they turned it into the classic it is today:

That arrangement! The subtle lyric switches. (“Proved too much for the man.”) Those horns! That muffled snare way up in the mix. The backing vocals! So good.

Here they are doing it on Soul Train. (I love how Gladys laughs right after she lays it down so hard.)

And here’s them on Midnight Special doin’ it sitting down:

The song was such a gigantic hit and the band got so big, they became the joke of a skit on The Richard Pryor Show:

And here’s a Doonesbury from 1974 sending them up (my father-in-law gave me this clipping years ago):

Oh no we’re still us

This is one of those rare New Yorker cartoons (by Will McPhail) you clip out and stick on the fridge. I thought about it the other day when I read the obituary for Dean Ford, lead singer of the Marmalade:

I wanted to start over. I wanted a new life. The trouble was, I brought myself with me.

That’s the beginning of a country song, right there. Here’s an old poem of mine to go with it:

It’s like Thoreau wrote in his journal (he could’ve written some country songs):

It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.

You can always turn around

About a dozen years ago, new to Texas, I lied down on a floor in a room with busted air conditioning and listened to this Bill Callahan song (about moving to Texas) and it felt like heaven. (From his wonderful album, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love.) The song begins:

I did not become someone different
I did not want to be
but I’m new here
will you show me around? 

This song — and this album, for that matter — like all great art, gets deeper and deeper for me over the years. Its lyrics are simple, but they are true, and all of the lines, like children, are my favorites, but today my most favorite line is refrain:

No matter how far
wrong you’ve gone
you can always turn around

And later in the song:

Turn around
Turn around
Turn around
and you may come full circle
and be new here… again.

Just a remarkable piece of music. A song that I would love to have played at my funeral.

Here is Gil-Scott Heron’s cover, from his last album, I’m New Here:

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