Austin Kleon – Page 481

GEORGE CARLIN, R.I.P.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

When we were teenagers, my best friend and I used to listen to George Carlin cds before we fell asleep. He was our philosopher king.

JOY DIVISION + CONTROL

Friday, June 20, 2008

see it bigger

Last night my wife said, “No more Joy Division. No more.”

This last week we watched both Anton Corbijn’s biopic Control and Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division. I’d recommend both if you’re a fan.

Some notes:

How essential Manchester was to the sound, and how much Joy Division’s music was rooted in place. One interviewee called their music “ambient noise” for the Manchester environment. Another said they took the landscape of Manchester and “made it cosmic.” Make it cosmic. That might be a good rule of thumb for writing about place…
Ian Curtis had a box of words that he’d bring to rehearsals, and when they needed lyrics, he would pull words out the box.
Remembered David Lynch talking about the myth of the suffering artist: in order to portray suffering, an artist doesn’t need to BE suffering, he just has to UNDERSTAND suffering. Suffering is often counterproductive to creativity. (Ian Curtis killed himself on the eve of their breakthrough US tour.)

Here’s my favorite performance — “Transmission” live on the BBC:

No language, just sound, is all we need know
To synchronize love to the beat of the show
And we could dance
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio

Here’s a little map I did during the second-ever Vizthink meetup in Austin last night. Local graphic facilitators Marilyn Martin and Sunni Brown moderated, and they did a great job. Met some good folks, learned a few things…it was a good time. If you’re an Austinite interested in visual thinking, keep your eyes and ears open for the next meeting at the Vizthink site.

Oh, and by the way: my post “For Successful Powerpoint Presentations, Look To Cartoonists” was chosen as the winner to the Vizthink prompt, “PowerPoint: A powerful tool poorly used or a poor tool overused?“

They said,

He not only had an interesting take on the topic but his post actually spun off a good amount of discussion on his own blog and beyond.

So thank YOU, my brilliant readers. Your comments make everything posted here much smarter. Cheers!

BRUSHWORK

Monday, June 16, 2008

I prefer to think I’m just a man, not a poet part time, business man the rest….I’m no different from anyone else, just a run of the mine person. I like painting, books, poems. In my younger days I liked girls. But let’s not stress that. I have a wife.— Wallace Stevens

She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.— Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

I just doodle until I find a character; you go with the one that has a certain little spark of life….After that, I really can’t force them to do anything. They know what they want to do if they’re strong characters. And they surprise you! If they want to do something, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.—James Kochalka