Austin Kleon

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First collages of the year

For closure, my first collage of the year was an ode to my kidney stone.

I made this second one in portrait, but I think I like it better landscape.

Here’s what they look like side-by-side in my diary:

It’s a beautiful evening. I’ve got the screen door open while I scan…

Here are my first collages from last year.

Drawing at the skate park

After our adventures at the Texas Book Festival, Jules and I walked west all the way across the Capitol grounds and down to the skate park by Lamar Blvd. I’m not sure Jules had seen anybody skateboard before. We watched the skaters and drew in our sketchbooks.

I’m not a skater myself, but I love to watch skaters. “I’m not familiar with the scene of skateboarding,” Werner Herzog said when he was shown a video of skateboarders. “At the same time, I had the feeling, yes, that’s kind of my people.”

One of my quarantine hobbies was watching skate videos of skaters in cities I wished I was in — I particularly love the Instagram of these dudes in San Francisco: @gx1000. (My friend James also sends me gnarly videos of hill bombing.)

Over time, I’ve been learning more about the sport, mostly by watching documentaries. I enjoyed Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off. I also watched Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, which gives you the context of the scenius around Hawk. The skater who steals the show in both documentaries is Rodney Mullen, who has become a sought-after consultant and public speaker. (His TED talk is worth watching.)

I also love to listen to skaters talk about how they see the world. Skateboarding seems to reconfigure your molecules and changes the way you look and the kind of attention you pay to the world. (Exactly what we hope for when practicing any art.)

Here’s Ian MacKaye in his Library of Congress lecture talking about skateboarding:

Skateboarding is not a hobby. And it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For most people, when they saw a swimming pool, they thought, ‘Let’s take a swim.’ But I thought, ‘Let’s ride it.’ When they saw the curb or a street, they would think about driving on it. I would think about the texture. I slowly developed the ability to look at the world through totally different means.

This is echoed by my friend, the photographer Clayton Cubitt:

Skateboarding irreparably changes the way you perceive the built physical world and structures of power that guard it…. It’s hard to ever have respect for authority again after you’ve bombed a rail and glided away from a security guard chasing and yelling at you.

“Skateboarding is neither sport nor art,” writes Bret Anthony Johnson. “It’s a path, a perspective, and a practice—a habit of being.”

Jules thought it was funny how many times the skaters fell down. He was kind of like, Who would choose to fall down over and over? (Bret Anthony Johnson, again: “Learning to skate is, in fact, tantamount to learning to fall.”)

I told him it was like kind of like drawing: You turn to a blank page and you take a ride on your pencil and then you turn the page and try again. (“Fall” and “fail” don’t have the same etymology, but they’re only one little dot apart.)

Not sure if any of that sank in, but we had a good time.

Starting from scraps

 

I think about this paragraph from David Rakoff’s Half Empty quite a bit:

Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing — I can really only speak to writing here — always, always only starts out as shit: an infant on monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.”

Hence, the necessity of shitty first drafts.

This is one reason I love collage so much — it’s very easy (for me) to take scraps and junk and push these pieces around, glue them to each other, and keep layering until it pleases me. This collage, for example, was started with random pieces of tape that I’d stuck to a worktable that was in storage for 2+ years while I had the new studio built. 

Here’s what it looked like when I started:

I’m constantly on a quest to make writing more hands on — more manipulative, in the sense that you’re using your hands to shape it. The more I treat writing like one of my collages, the better it gets. (One reason I love the blackouts.)

Lawrence Weschler’s Taxonomy of Convergences


Here is a map in my diary of Lawrence Weschler’s “Taxonomy of Convergences” that the writer has been working out in the past five issues of his Substack.

His idea of “convergences” — when something resembles something else, or makes you go, “that reminds me of…” and you make “free associative linkages” — has been a big influence on me. (See my blog tag: “Convergences.”)

Here is an example of a convergence from Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences: 

late Rothko vs. the moon landing

In this recent taxonomy, Weschler proposes a spectrum of things that resemble one another, ranging from an imagined but not real connection (“apophenia”) to a connection that is being deliberately concealed (plagiarism).

The only trouble is that these marvelous pieces have been sort of buried in his numbered Substack issues, so I’m hoping by sharing these images from my diary and direct links to the pieces, maybe it’ll make you want to click through. It’s a lot to sift through, but it rewards the sifter.

First up is an introduction to the concept of “convergences.”

Second is Apophenia, Chance/Accident, and Affinity, or “inchoate projections, vague coincidences and misty affinities” in which there is no real underlying connection other than the one we make.

The third installment is “Co-Causation,” or “that part of the widening spectrum where if things happen to look alike, it’s because they’re likely to be drawing on the same sorts of sources.”

The fourth installment covers “Direct Influence” and “Invocation,” or, “the kind of things that happen as one artist or thinker or group of such artists or thinkers impacts upon another—both forward and backward, and consciously and unconsciously.”

The fifth installment covers Allusion, Quotation, Appropriation, Cryptomnesia, and Plagiarism. (My favorite of the batch.) Weschler ends at a point on the spectrum in which things resemble each other for a reason, but the reason is being hidden from us.

I suspect that some of us are wired to see these convergences more than others. But I also think this way of seeing is very infectious. (I call it “the world keeps showing me these pictures.”)

Show your children who you are

“Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
—Jim Henson

My grandma died on Monday night. I wrote these pages in my diary yesterday morning, and reflexively, almost without thinking, posted them on my Instagram. Since then, I have been awash in kind condolences in the comments.

I was surprised by how many people mentioned how well I knew grandma. One sentiment seemed to be something like, “How nice to be known like this!”

I was blessed with grandmas who had things they liked to do and things they liked to do with me. I always took it for granted that they shared who they were with me.

This is not a given thing, having adults in our lives who love us and are willing to let us really see them.

Yesterday I re-read an interview with one of my favorite songwriters, Bill Callahan, and he spoke about his relationship with his mother:

“I never understood her,” he admits. “And I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life. As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it. So now she’s still just an unfinished person for me.” He rubs his eyes and his spirit seems to lighten, as if suddenly struck with a pleasant memory. “We only have this time, each of us, 70 or 80 years, if we’re lucky. What’s the point of hiding?”

“Show your children who you are.” Or: Love what you do in front of the kids in your life.

It is a great gift to them, and the best way to be remembered.

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