Somehow the 4-year-old got the idea that a caboose is called a “podunk” and why on Earth would I ever set him straight?
He also drew this incredible drawing of Beethoven:
(A lot happens around the kitchen table before 9AM.)
Somehow the 4-year-old got the idea that a caboose is called a “podunk” and why on Earth would I ever set him straight?
He also drew this incredible drawing of Beethoven:
(A lot happens around the kitchen table before 9AM.)
The moving truck didn’t come for a week after we moved into our new place. Our furniture: four air mattresses, five milk crates, and two borrowed camping chairs. No wifi. We are Indoorspeople and this was the closest to roughing it our family was probably ever going to get.
A few days in, I found this Smith Corona at the Goodwill. It became a big part of our entertainment, each of us taking our turn on the keys. The clickety clacks banged and reverberated in the empty space.
That was over a month ago. We’re settled in with all our stuff now, but I look back fondly on that week. At night we drank beer and played Uno and checkers and went to bed early. It felt terrific.
On the left is a collage I made a year and a half ago, on the right is the view from a folding chair I was sitting in yesterday. Burroughs, in his wonderful Paris Review interview and elsewhere, spoke of how collage and cut-ups were a form of time travel.
From Conversations with William S. Burroughs:
…it is a matter of the future and the past being laid out, so that you can see both the future and the past from the present. There is a very interesting book by John Donne called An Experiment With Time, written in 1925. He started writing down his dreams and found that they very often referred to future events. I dream about earthquakes, and he had a very interesting point to make about that. He said that if you dream about an earthquake, you are not foreseeing the actual event. What you are seeing is the moment when you will become aware of it. That is, the moment you will see it in a newspaper or hear about it on the news. In other words, you are moving forward on your own time track to a moment of your own future awareness.
He then spoke about art as a “creative act”:
Paul Klee said that art does not simply render nature, it renders it visible. The artist sees something that others do not see, and by seeing it and putting it on canvas, he makes it visible to others. Recognition art. A particle physicist at the University of Texas named John Wheeler has developed something that he calls “recognition physics.” Wheeler says that nothing exists until it is observed. Well, the artist as observer is like that. The observer creates by observing, and the observer observes by creating. In other words, observation is a creative act. By observing something and putting it onto canvas, the artist makes something visible to others that did not exist until he observed it.
After posting our studio rules, several people reminded me of Kanye West’s rules in the studio while recording My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. (I first remember seeing these on Matt Thomas’s blog in 2013.)
Pusha T said of the experience:
“Once we hit the studio, it was just all focus on the music. All focus was one hundred percent on the music. There were rules: no Twittering, no e-mailing, no blog-watching – no stupid questions. All of this stuff is posted all over the walls. A wall of questions, for inspirations. ‘What would Mobb Deep do?’ All types of stuff.”
In an excerpt from his new memoir, Hurricanes, Rick Ross (who intro’d Kanye to Pusha T) describes the studio:
I started to gather that this wasn’t going to be my typical guest verse. The first thing I noticed were all these signs Kanye had put up on the walls.
NO TWEETING
NO HIPSTER HATS
ALL LAPTOPS ON MUTE
JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP SOMETIMES
NO TWEETING PLEASE THANK YOU
NO BLOGGING
NO NEGATIVE BLOG VIEWING
DON’T TELL ANYONE ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING WE’RE DOING!
NO RACKING FOCUS WHILE MUSIC IS BEING PLAYED OR MUSIC IS BEING MADE
TOTAL FOCUS ON THIS PROJECT IN ALL STUDIOS
NO ACOUSTIC GUITAR IN THE STUDIO
NO PICTURESI wasn’t sure what tweeting was but I did know that something different was taking place here.
Kanye is also against waking up with your phone:
Here’s a cassette tape I used to keep in my Honda in college. Probably tells you a lot about me.
I got to thinking about it after watching the “Hillbilly Shakespeare” episode of Ken Burns’ documentary about country music on PBS.
Hank Williams, man. Those songs! Here’s what Bob Dylan wrote about him in Chronicles:
I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words – all of the syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records.
On the flip side, you could say the same about Ramones songs. They’re like little math equations. (Dee Dee shouting, “One! Two! Three! Four!”)
Back to the tape: Kate Bingaman-Burt made a few drawings of it back in 2010 for her “Other People’s Music” project:
And those drawings inspired this exercise in The Steal Like An Artist Journal:
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