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Nice News profile
A very nice profile of me over at Nice News covers a bunch of the stuff I practice and preach.
“It’s funny. I consider myself a deeply lazy person,” Kleon answered with a laugh when asked how he manages to be so prolific. “And that’s where the discipline comes in.”
He said that many people are intimidated by that word — discipline — but the way he defines it is simple, and comes courtesy of guitarist Robert Fripp: making a commitment in time. “Just showing up over and over again is kind of my way that I get over everything, over my laziness, over my apathy, over my despair at what might be going on in the wider world,” Kleon shared.
(That excerpt led to today’s newsletter, “The subtle art of showing up.”)
Big thanks for Rebekah Brandes for her thoughtful questions and great writing.
You can read the whole piece here.
I can’t stop printing
The last few newsletters have shown off how obsessed I’ve become with printmaking — I can’t seem to stop!
From “All is not well (but some things are”:
“Not everything will be okay but some things will.” Years ago, I saw that phrase on a slide at the end of a Maira Kalman talk. It has stuck with me. I wanted to put my own spin on it, so I made a block print with the words, “All is not well (but some things are.)” I was looking for material to print it on, and settled on a few thrifted copies of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation.
I made these prints after writing today’s newsletter, “The subtle art of showing up”:
I get several forms of the question, “What good is making art in times like these?”
There are many decent answers, but the one that rings truest to me, I think, comes from art coach Beth Pickens: “Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work, and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.”
If I don’t show up for creative work, I suffer. I’m not a whole person. If I don’t show up to the studio, it’s harder for me to show up for the people in my life.
And, really, that’s all, sometimes, you have to do: just show up.
I’m getting many “what are you going to do with all these prints?!?” questions… so that might be the subject of next week’s newsletter…
Interview with musician Walter Martin
I had a super fun conversation with musician Walter Martin that you can watch on Substack.
I’ll be chatting live with musician Walter Martin on Monday, April 7th at 12pm central as part of “The Substack Sessions.” (As a failed musician, I never expected to be on a list with some of these names, but there I am…)
A Satisfied Mind
Here’s another monthly mixtape made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.
I wrote about the mix’s origins and shared some of my custom “dub” tracks in today’s newsletter:
It began when I read novelist Elizabeth McCracken’s latest dispatch from Barton Springs pool here in Austin. She titled it “One Rich Man in Ten,” which is a line from the country song, “A Satisfied Mind”:
How many times have you heard someone say
‘If I had his money I’d do things my way’
But little they know
It’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
with a satisfied mind…
You can read more here.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Here’s the tracklist:
Side A
– Porter Wagoner, “A Satisfied Mind” (dub)
– Hiroshi Yoshimura, “Over The Clover” (dub)
– Mac DeMarco, “Chamber of Reflection”
– Augustus Pablo, “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown”
– Unknown Mortal Orchestra, “That Life”
– The Congos, “Congoman”
– Sly and the Family Stone, “If You Want Me To Stay”
– Frankie Knuckles, “The Whistle Song”
– Chet Atkins and Dolly Parton, “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?”
Side B
– Arthur Russell, “That’s Us / Wild Combination”
– Yellow Magic Orchestra, “Gradated Grey”
– Mekons, “Last Night on Earth”
– Upsetters, “Three in One”
– Branko Mataja, “Tesko Mi Je Zaboravit Tebe”
– Little Joy, “No One’s Better Sake”
– Radiohead, “Weird Fishes”
– Kim Deal, “Are You Mine?”
– Carlton Haney monologue about Pythagoras and bluegrass
Filed under: mixtapes
Block printing and dub reggae
After I got back from New Orleans a few weeks ago we launched right into spring break mode, and pretty much all I wanted to do was listen to dub reggae and make block prints.
In a Tuesday mailbag, “The point of this world,” I wrote quite a bit about music:
Music is a form of transportation. A joy in the past year has been the way our vacations with the boys have synced up with a particular kind of music — every time I hear Yellow Magic Orchestra, for example, I’m back driving around in the deserts of New Mexico. Whenever I want to be driving around Oahu, I put on our Oahu mixtape.
On Friday, I shared some images of a print I made: “Be the weird you wish to see.”
There are terrible things happening in the world, but you can’t let it rob you of getting joy out of your day-to-day living while you can. One thing that never fails me: Stepping away from the screen and leaving the house. This week I found some major treasure on one of our daily walks. I took my kids to a baseball game. I shopped for records and art supplies and chatted with strangers. I know I’ve said it over and over and over again but I’ll say it again: the more I make an effort to engage locally with my neighborhood and my city, the better I feel about life.
A bunch of folks asked me how I do it, so I shared “an unofficial guide to block printing”:
I want to emphasize that I am a total amateur at this stuff, and I will miss a bunch that you can learn elsewhere in tutorials by more qualified people. That said, I wrote a whole section in Show Your Work! about how there’s a lot of value in learning from beginners. Because beginners have only recently figured stuff out, they know what a beginner needs to know better than an expert does…
And tomorrow’s newsletter starts out with an animation made with a bunch of the block prints I made for Tuesday’s posts.
This is how the newsletter comes together: just one thing leading into another.
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