What you think is boring now may be interesting in the future

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Looking at the glorious grocery store advertisements in this photo of John Cage from the poster for Nam June Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage, I remembered something my friend the photographer Clayton Cubitt once tweeted:

I think about this all the time, now. (I wrote more about it in a previous post on pack rats and collecting.) What you try to crop out and hide now might eventually be what people will want to see.

The trouble is that it’s hard to predict what will be interesting, and a lot of what will eventually be interesting will be saved on accident, because somebody didn’t bother to throw something out, or it got lost, or it was buried somewhere. (Archeologists love uncovering garbage dumps, for example.)

Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark

“Look at this,” says the villain Belloq to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless.”

Five Card Nancy

Saturday, January 30, 2021

I finally got around to buying a blank deck of playing cards and making a deck for Five Card Nancy. The instructions for making a deck and playing the game are over on Scott McCloud’s website.

I haven’t actually played by those rules yet. So far I just use the deck almost like Tarot or Oblique Strategies, pulling a single card for fun, or doing a “past, present, future” draw.

Most of those panels were pulled from my beloved copies of the Nancy collections published by Fantagraphics. (So far, only volume one, volume two, and volume three.) These are gorgeous books, and sadly, if I’m not mistaken, out-of-print. Ernie Bushmiller’s strip has given me so much comfort over the years. When my second son was born, it was all I could read — now he absconds to his bunk with them to read before bed.

The old joke is, “it’s easier to read Nancy than to not read it,” but the strip is actually much more artful and sophisticated than you’d think. (For more, see the book How To Read Nancy.)

* * *

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Silence and street sweeping

Friday, January 29, 2021

The Creative Process in 43 Hayao Miyazaki Screengrabs

In the “When In Doubt, Tidy Up,” chapter of Keep Going, I wrote about how the writer David Sedaris spends up to 8 hours a day walking and picking up trash by the side of the road. He’s picked up so much trash, in fact, that they named a garbage truck after him:

My favorite thing about this article is that nowhere do they bother mentioning that Sedaris is a famous writer

So it delighted me to find out that 79-year-old animator and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki spends a portion of his morning picking up trash and cleaning the street outside of his home.

One reporter decided to take advantage of his routine and ambushed him with a bunch of dumb questions about a movie named Demon Slayer, which is about to overtake Spirited Away’s box office record. Miyazaki’s response was so good:

“Well, I don’t think it has anything to do with me. It’s better if people don’t concern themselves with things like box-office records and concentrate on making their workplaces harmonious instead. It’s fine as long as you work hard on what you’re making.”

The reporter asked him if he’d seen Dragon Slayer.

“No I haven’t. I rarely watch other things. I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch movies. I’m a retired old man picking up trash.”

The reporter said some fans would be upset.

“That sort of thing isn’t worth worrying about. There’s always inflation in the world. Right now, I have to pick up trash…”

The reporter asked him more questions and he ended the interview by repeating himself: “I have to go around and pick up trash.”

Legend.

Silence as ear cleaning

Thursday, January 28, 2021

“Silence is a space for something to happen.”
—Ursula Franklin

You know, I don’t think I’ve actually ever watched John Cage perform “4:33.” Even a minute and a half is enough to chill me out and clean my ears. (This clip is from the video artist Nam June Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage.)

“The ear, unlike some other sense organs, is exposed and vulnerable,” writes Murray Schafer in Ear Cleaning: Notes on an Experimental Music Course. “The eye can be closed at will; the ear is always open.” In the chapter, “Silence,” Murray writes, “Silence is a pocket of possibility.”

Man likes to make sounds and to surround himself with sounds. Silence is the outcome of the rejection of human personality. Man fears the absence of sound as he fears the absence of life. There is nothing so sublime or stunning in music as silence.

The ultimate silence is death.

Silence feels so good to me these days it’s like what the French call, “la petite mort,” or “little death.” Relief. Release. A clearing out. An emptying.

One incredible thing about Derek DelGaudio’s *In and Of Itself* is that this title card actually worked on me

“An artist has to understand silence,” says Marina Abramovic. “An artist has to create space for silence to enter his work. Silence is like an island, in the middle of a terrible ocean.”

“Now I will do nothing but listen,” wrote Walt Whitman, “To accrue what I hear…”

how it started / how it's going pic.twitter.com/grluOXjJRX

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 28, 2021

Filed under: silence

The lamp vs. the sun

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

It’s been one year since Jason Polan died. I am re-reading my diary entry from August 8, 2018, the last time I saw him. It is no coincidence that seeing him made me think about seeing — he was one of the great see-ers of our generation, always looking, always seeing.

I have been practicing a lot of Debussy on the piano, and read a letter he wrote to his friend, quoted in Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise:

I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun…. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen….”

Jason’s work smelled of the sun, and if it ever smelled like a lamp, it smelled like a lamp in Taco Bell: absolutely delicious.

If you don’t know his work, watch this video, narrated by his friend, Fritz Swanson, for the new site by UNIQLO, which features a letter from Jason’s mother. Jen Bekman also wrote a remembrance at 20×200.

Then pick up a Uniball Vision Elite Bold and a Strathmore 4×6 pad, take a walk, and draw what you see.

And be nice to people.