Austin Kleon

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Soup

Yesterday I was not, to put it in Dostoevsky’s terms, worthy of my sufferings. So I went out for ramen. I took Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning with me. My copy is an old paperback that belongs to my father-in-law. I’m borrowing it. I have been borrowing it for over a decade.

The first time I read the book was 8 years ago on lunch breaks in the library at the law school I worked for. I loved it then, not just for the words or the message, but for my father-in-law’s teenage underlines and perfect cursive marginalia. I knew my wife when she was young had read the same copy, and I wished that she had made her own underlines, maybe with a red pencil, to differentiate them from her dad’s, and then I would’ve added my own, maybe with a blue pencil. Instead, I took notes on a few index cards and left them as bookmarks.

I was about to crack it again yesterday, when my bowl of ramen came out quicker than I expected. So I let the paperback sit there on the counter as I slurped soup.

Frankl writes a lot about soup. In the concentration camp, soup was life. A cigarette could be traded for a bowl. Cooks would favor some prisoners by ladling from the bottom of the pot for bits of potato or peas, while shorting others by skimming off the top broth. The men told jokes about how they envisioned attending dinner parties in the future where they would suddenly forget themselves and beg the hostess to serve the soup “from the bottom!”

I took my time with the ramen. It was so delicious that at the end I lifted the bowl with two hands and swallowed the very last drop. I felt my spirits lift immediately.

I re-read the book at home this morning, adding my own notes and underlines this time, but in that moment back at the restaurant, I decided I didn’t really need the book. What I needed was the soup.

In praise of the good old-fashioned hobby

“Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.”
—Hugh MacLeod

In chapter 5 of Steal Like An Artist, I sing the praises of the good-old fashioned hobby, the thing you do outside of work, for fun. “A hobby is something creative that’s just for you. You don’t try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it makes you happy. A hobby is something that gives but doesn’t take.”

Since I wrote that over half a decade ago, things have just gotten worse in America, and as steady jobs keep disappearing and the market continues to gobble up the culture, the “free time” activities which used to soothe us and take our minds off work and add meaning to our lives are now presented to us as potential income streams. (“Make money doing what you love!”)

how to stay alive

This week Ann Friedman wrote the piece I’ve been wanting to write, “Not Everything Is a Side Hustle.” Like me, she grew up in the Midwest, “practically born with a glue gun in my hand,” and she now practices a kind of “general craftiness.” Her new thing is deviled eggs (a personal favorite of mine):

For the past few years, I’ve been bringing these eggy experiments with me to barbecues and potlucks, where, through a mouthful of mayonnaise, someone will suggest that I start a deviled-egg catering business. It is a tempting idea (I could call the business “She-Deviled”!). And I know that people are suggesting egg-entrepreneurship as a compliment—their way of saying, “These are so good I would pay for them!”—but I take the implication seriously. At a time when Etsy shops and craft fairs and food trucks are decidedly mainstream, every domestic hobby is at risk of becoming a side hustle. I don’t want to boil and slice eggs for money. Messing around with a stand mixer or a sewing machine is fun for me because it’s not work. Personal pleasure is what makes a hobby a hobby.

I’m encouraged by Anne’s spirit, and I’ve been seeking other inspirations out there, examples of people who are out there happily practicing and protecting their hobbies.  Oddly, one of my favorite inspirations is fictional and foreign: the BBC series Detectorists, in which two friends go rambling around the countryside with their metal detectors. Director and actor Mackenzie Crook says he got the original inspiration for the show from thinking about hobbies:

I’m fascinated by people and their pastimes and their hobbies, the way people their free time. It seems to me like it’s a very British thing. (I don’t know if it is.) The way people can just immerse themselves and get obsessed by subjects that to a lot of other people would seem like a dull way to spend a weekend. I wanted it to be an affectionate study of people and their pastimes. I decided on metal detecting as a good… you know, there’s lots of metaphors there for what they’re really looking for in their lives.

Spoiler alert: a hobby which at first seems to simply be about seeking fortune in buried treasure turns out to be more about the hunt and spending time with your mates. I love how the show celebrates people doing something that everybody else thinks is a complete waste of time. In one episode, the character Lance talks about how a hobby is better if people don’t understand it: “What you want is for your partner to shake her head, roll her eyes, and look at you and say, ‘You and your hobbies.’”

George Carlin said he didn’t have hobbies, he had interests. “Hobbies cost money. Interests are free.” I think you need both, and I wonder if Crook’s hunch about the British being better at hobbies is true — it certainly feels true to me. As our empire crumbles, we would do well to observe how citizens of former empires enjoy a nice pint, a ramble, and a bit of tinkering.

3 quick thoughts about copyright

Pretty much every time there is a plagiarism or copyright case in the news, someone will ask me for my opinion. Most of the time I not only don’t have an opinion, I don’t want to have an opinion, because having an opinion — artistic or legal — would require me to: 1) investigate whatever pop singer or cultural producer is being accused of infringing  2) think about copyright law. There are so many other smart people thinking about it, like Lessig, Doctorow, Hyde, Ferguson, etc., and, I mean, if I wanted to think about copyright law all day, I’d have done what my parents wanted me to do and gone to law school.

That said, I’m writing this blog post as a placeholder (or thought-holder) so that I can link to it whenever somebody asks me what I think about so-and-so ripping off so-and-so:

1. Copyright is not a bad thing. 

Because I wrote a book called Steal Like An Artist, many assume I’m some sort of copyright crusader, that I think copyright should be abolished. Nope! Copyright keeps a roof over our heads and food in my kids’ bellies. The whole point of copyright law is to encourage people to share their creative work for everyone’s benefit by making sure the creators can be fairly compensated for it. (Do I think the copyright system in the U.S. has been completely twisted by gigantic corporations? Yes.) Steal Like An Artist is not a book about copyright infringement. If you’re a good thief, you don’t get caught: You transform your influences, so that the stolen parts become a new whole. (People also think I’m a fan of any kind of remix—not true! Like every other kind of creative work, I think that 90% of remixes are crap.) Furthermore, I think that legal constraints can lead to interesting artistic constraints.

2. Responses to claims of plagiarism are more interesting than the plagiarism itself.

How the accused, the accuser, and spectators respond to claims of infringement tells you loads about them and how they think about creative work. For example, plagiarism is not very interesting in itself, but an author’s attempts to justify it can be. It’s also fun to watch the web unravel when lawyers get lathered up and fingers start being pointed: I’ve seen artists accuse other artists of ripping off their work, only to be found out later for having ripped off their work from another artist!

One of my favorite responses to a lawsuit was James Cameron’s attorney, who wrote that Cameron is the “most original and creative person in the motion picture business today” and doesn’t need to copy from anybody. (Ron Howard narrator’s voice: “He does.”)

Juries are a whole other can of worms: One person’s transformation is another person’s infringement, and if you think about how little your average person understands about art and music, there’s no telling what a jury will decide.

3. What is right is not necessarily legal and what is legal is not necessarily right.

I think of copyright cases like Elmore Leonard novels: there’s a bag of money and everybody’s trying to get their hands on it. The smaller the turf, the bigger the war, and as it becomes harder and harder to make a living, as the collective bag of money for musicians and other artists shrinks and shrinks, there will be plenty of attorneys happy to resort to suing for whatever’s up for grabs.

The real winners in any copyright case are the lawyers. It rarely has anything to do with the art. Every artist knows that art comes from art—it’s only the honest ones who admit it. But the reality is we live with a legal system that leads to musicians being advised not to acknowledge any influence whatsoever. Hide the truth and cover your ass — like everything else in American life, we’re stuck navigating between what we know is right and real and what’s the law.

PS. The collage above is a homage to the monkey selfie case.

100 things that made my year (2017)

Suggested accompaniment: my 2017 playlist on shuffle play

  1. Taking a walk every morning because the demons hate fresh air.
  2. Driving the California coast from San Diego to San Francisco.
  3. Going back to Italy. Walking around Milan and Turin to Cannonball Adderly’s Somethin’ Else.
  4. Antigua, Guatemala.
  5. Austin’s new central library. Walking there from my house through the greenbelt.
  6. Watching the solar eclipse in the courtyard of the Art Institute of Chicago.
  7. Lake Michigan in the summer. The lookout at Arcadia. Sleeping Bear Dunes. The S.S. Badger.
  8. Keeping a good old-fashioned diary. Holding my tongue and loosening my pen. Having a good place to have bad ideas. Taping guardian spirits inside the front cover. Re-reading.
  9. Reading diaries. Thoreau, daily. Kafka. Kaethe Kollwitz. Andy Warhol. David Sedaris.
  10. DJing a one-hour set for KUTX.
  11. Getting more and more into to classical music. Taking my son to free concerts around town. Playing Schumann and Bach on piano. Listening to KMFA. Max Richter’s recomposed Four Seasons. Michael Torke’s saxophone quartet, “July.” Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirit. Stories about Beethoven. Drawing comics about Brahms.
  12. Looking at the moon. Knowing what moon phase it is based on how shitty I feel. Using Sky Guide to find constellations. 100 Aspects of the Moon. The lunar Rashomon collage chapter in Lincoln In The Bardo. Mary Ruefle’s essay on poets and the moon in Madness, Rack, and Honey.
  13. Thinking about seasons.
  14. Glueing one thing to another. Finding the simplest cut.
  15. Hannah Höch.
  16. Lance Letscher.
  17. Being lazy. Taking naps. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers. The song “Hallelujah, I’m A Bum!” Raymond Carver’s “Loafing.” Manifesto of the idle parent.
  18. Buying a huge 4K TV at Costco for the bedroom and watching too much television. Binge-watching The Good Place, Halt and Catch Fire, Detectorists, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Catastrophe, and Grand Designs. Watching bad cable movies on the Roku channel.
  19. Killing whole afternoons with 17776 and Universal Paperclips.
  20. Going to Clark’s on a date with my wife and ordering affogato and then watching every other couple copy us.
  21. Common Sense Media.
  22. Listening to good podcast miniseries while working out, like Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect and Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing.
  23. The digitized Corita Kent archives. Getting her GO SLO poster for Christmas.
  24. Accepting that nobody knows what’s gonna happen and working without hope and without despair.
  25. Chuck Berry (RIP) reciting Theodore Tilton’s poem, “Even This Shall Pass Away.”
  26. Not waking up to the news. Not arguing with strangers on the internet. Staying out of the shitstream. Logging off. Not paying for wi-fi. (“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you.”)
  27. Bill Withers on why he walked away the music business.
  28. Library extension.
  29. My paper dictionary.
  30. An “organ donor” in our neighborhood giving us an old Hammond for the music room.
  31. A neighbor giving my wife a whole case of ginger beer and drinking Moscow Mules all summer.
  32. Saying I could read 10,000 words on Raffi, then finding Sheila Heti’s profile. Listening to “Bananaphone” on repeat until slaphappy.
  33. Perfume Genius’s “Queen” and No Shape.
  34. Walt Whitman.
  35. Lao Tzu.
  36. X’s More Fun In The New World.
  37. Gang of Four, Solid Gold.
  38. Buying a Rolodex at Goodwill for $2.
  39. Warren Craghead’s Trump drawings.
  40. Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers.
  41. Old George Carlin specials. Jammin’ in New York.
  42. Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne.
  43. Doing something that will outlast them.
  44. Eating perfect chicken fingers on the beach in Grand Cayman.
  45. $7 Tex-Mex lunch specials. City Of Gold. Molly Savage’s Costco food court painting. “The Case for Bad Coffee” and “In Praise of Ugly Food” from Best Food Writing 2016. Stories about Olive Garden.
  46. Valentina’s Tex-Mex BBQ.
  47. Sitting in a booth at Jim’s on 71.
  48. The new Reese’s peanut butter cups with Reese’s Pieces in them.
  49. Cup of Calm tea.
  50. Eating clam chowder at the Legal Seafood bar in the Philadelphia airport.
  51. Hong Ting’s “The Fisherman’s Song at Dusk.”
  52. Denis Johnson (RIP) on homeschooling his kids.
  53. My friend Laura, saying, “Take it year by year, kid by kid.”
  54. Learning how to learn again. Making lists of what I want to learn. Studying something you love in depth.
  55. Art with the kids. Drawing skeletons. Orchestrated drawings. Raising surrealists.
  56. Getting permission from Nina Katchadourian’s show Curiouser at the Blanton.
  57. Soul music. Sam & Dave’s “Soothe Me.” The Impressions’ “Keep On Pushin’.” D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Al Green doing “Here I Am” on Soul Train. Sam and Dave on German TV in 1967. James Gadson’s drumming for Bill Withers.
  58. Bill Knott’s short poems. (And bonus poems.)
  59. Jackie Shane’s motto, explained during her monologue on “Money,” on Any Other Way: “Do what you want, but know what you’re doing.”
  60. Discovering Walter Murch and In The Blink of an Eye.
  61. Watching old Val Lewton horror movies on Filmstruck.
  62. Blogging every day since October 1st.
  63. Paper.
  64. Laura Walls’ biography of Thoreau.
  65. Getting a new stereo and CD player. Discovering how amazing CDs sound after streaming for so many years.
  66. Going to End of An Ear with my son and buying him Kraftwerk and LCD Soundsystem CDs.
  67. David Rakoff’s Half Empty and his rant about Rent.
  68. Tidying up here and there, but also embracing mess.
  69. Slowing down.
  70. The harp of Mary Lattimore. (And her Instagram.)
  71. Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen really loud in the car. (Emotion and “Cut To The Feeling.”)
  72. Books about exploring. Thoreau, again. John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic. Keri Smith’s The Wander Society. Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost.
  73. Apocalyptic songs. William Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb.” (RIP.) Sonny and The Sunsets’ “Dark Corners.” Tubeway Army’s “Are Friends Electric?” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.”
  74. Watching movies in the theater. Blade Runner 2049. Paterson. The Last Jedi. Baby Driver. Singin’ in the Rain.
  75. Watching movies in bed. Get Out. The Handmaiden. The Lobster. Time Bandits. The Thin Man. My Man Godfrey. In Order of Disappearance. The Limey. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Christmas in Connecticut.
  76. Re-watching old favorites. Moonstruck. Lebowski. Only Lovers Left Alive. The Apartment. Heat. Groundhog Day. It Happened One Night. Young Frankenstein. Coming To America. When Harry Met Sally. Magic Mike XXL. Royal Tenenbaums. Creed. John Wick!
  77. Starting a fight club with my recycle bin.
  78. Seeing coyotes and roadrunners on our morning walks. The legend of Steve.
  79. The pilot at the Atlanta airport who went out of his way to show me an art installation.
  80. Not telling people how it’s done. John Cage’s parable about not teaching.
  81. Edna St. Vincent Millay reading “Recuerdo.”
  82. James Patterson blurbing himself.
  83. How Esther Pearl Watson paints her characters nude before adding clothes.
  84. Tana Hoban’s books about signs and symbols.
  85. Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s “You May Want To Marry My Husband.” (RIP) Her daughter Paris’s Instagram. Paying attention to what you pay attention to.
  86. Seeing friends during SXSW and the Texas Book Festival.
  87. Drawing comics on the iPad Pro.
  88. Getting to read great books before they’re released. Alan Jacob’s How To Think. Tim Kreider’s I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.
  89. Having a weekly library routine. Going to Miss Monica’s story times at the Hampton Branch at Oak Hill with the kids and hitting P. Terry’s after.
  90. All the funny things my oldest son said. “Your skin keeps your bones from getting dirty!” At the pool: “She wouldn’t talk to me… She must not have any teeth!” At the playground, a kid told him that Jesus was dead, and he said, “So is Beethoven!” Playing him Ray Charles: “Papa, This is making me dance!” Referring to bowling as “pinball.” Seeing our monogrammed towels: “K is for Kraftwerk!” The time he called Leonard Bernstein “Bernie Einstein.” Shouting in frustration, “Who in the world made this stupid screwdriver?? It says ‘Made In China’ but it doesn’t say who made it!!!” The time he walked in on me watching Blade Runner, and he saw Deckard eating with chopsticks, and he said, “That guy is KNITTING HIS NOODLES!” Seeing snow: “I like how snow looks in real life!” The time I told him I thought he’d like marionettes, and he said, “Does she know a lot about bones?”
  91. My two-year-old conducting Beethoven.
  92. Silence. Sleeping with an eye mask and ear plugs.
  93. Teaching myself, finally, to solder. Soldering broken toy electronics back together.
  94. Recording songs on my old Tascam 4-track with my five-year-old, with titles like “Skeleton Girlfriend” and “I Don’t Want To Be Dead (Like Beethoven Is Dead)”
  95. An epic 30-minute UNO game with my wife.
  96. Drinking champagne on ice in a pint glass.
  97. A bowl of cereal when you can’t sleep.
  98. Getting up in the night to take a pee and looking out the bathroom window at the moonlit backyard.
  99. Giving it five minutes. Changing my mind.
  100. Reading books.

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