Austin Kleon

Solo walks

“Let’s stay together.”

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking walks without my walking buddies, and while I kind of hate it, I do gawk around more and take time to stop for pictures.

I noticed these lovely sidewalk shadows and got the idea to stitch them together. (The simplest cut.)

And when I saw this spider, I squatted down to get this angle:

If you’d like some great prompts for your own walks, check out Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.

When a wrong answer brings out the right answer

“Prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai.” (“Preach the falsehood to know the truth.”)

I was on Twitter the other day (my first mistake) and I was thinking about how weird it is that sometimes if you ask a direct question there, almost nobody replies, but if you throw out some dumb opinion, you’ll get hundreds of replies.

For example, if you wanted to know about some good science magazines, you almost shouldn’t bother tweeting, “Does anybody know some good science magazines?” instead, you’d be much better off tweeting, “there are no good science magazines” and waiting for the reply pile-on of everyone ready to prove you wrong.1

xkcd, “Duty Calls”

It turns out that this phenomenon is called Cunningham’s Law: “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.” (A relative, for sure, of  “Why wasn’t I consulted?”)

The writer Kevin Donnellan tested out the law and reported his findings in “I spent a week being wrong online.” The results were a bit inconclusive, and it’s worth noting that Ward Cunningham, the law’s namesake, denies its paternity, and claims it is a “misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet.”

What seems even more valuable is taking the position of the idiot, ignorant, but curious.

Here’s @tcarmody again:

besides getting people riled up, claiming ignorance is a good way to overcome people’s “they must already know about X” rarity threshold. They don’t think they need to be special, obscure, or original in their replies

I like this idea quite a bit — getting answers not by asking others to be experts, but by positioning yourself as a total noob…

* * *

  1. @tcarmody suggested “there are no good Ys besides X” as a good construction that gets results.

Drawing as an embodied transmission

In a conversation with Cheryl Strayed about her book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel said:

Something I thought about a lot as I was drawing this book is what a gloriously physical activity it is to draw. I draw for hours on end and it’s like an endurance exercise. There’s something physical that happens with that line coming out of my hand onto the page that is different from what I might type or do on the computer.

It is very embodied and I feel like drawing is a tracing of the world for me. I’m showing you what I’m seeing and then you’re holding it in your hands. It’s like this touch-based transmission.

For me, this fact is both the magic and the curse of comics.

One of the brutal realities for cartoonists is that drawing is such an embodied transmission that readers who are unfamiliar with your work might be initially repelled by your drawings and not be able to “get past” them to start turning the pages. (And, in fact, there really is no “getting past” the drawing of a comic — the drawing is the medium is the message.)

Comics is a labor-intensive medium, and the ratio of work put in by the maker vs. work put in by the reader is already super high. But because so much of the hand is in the work, it also has an initial visceral fail point, much like a podcast or a film: if the audience doesn’t like the narrator’s voice or the actor’s face, sometimes it’s adios before the story even begins.

This is one thing to be said for plain ol’ typeset prose: there’s very little right away on the page to repel the reader before they even dip into the work. Just words on a page, what do they say?

Now, keeping the reader reading, that’s hard no matter what medium you’re working in…

The machine must be alive and intelligent

“The machine doesn’t write the music. You tell the machine what to do and the machine is an extension of you.”
—Laurie Spiegel

“We are playing the machines, the machines play us.”
—Kraftwerk

RIP Lee “Scratch” Perry. Here are some doodles I drew while watching The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry.

Most of my favorite music that he produced — stuff like Super Ape and The Heart of the Congos — was made in his home studio — the “Black Ark” — with “just a four-track quarter-inch TEAC reel-to-reel, 16-track Soundcraft board, Mutron phase, and Roland Space Echo.” As has been noted by so many, he played the studio itself like an instrument:

I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves – you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live.

In this amazing clip from the 1977 documentary Roots, Rock, Reggae: Inside the Jamaican Music Scene, you can see him at work in his prime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y651C7aNXRc

Perry would do all kinds of weird stuff to get wild sounds into the music — to inject some sort of aliveness into his machines, to mix the organic into the synthetic — stuff like burying a microphone under a palm tree and beating it for a bass drum. Wikipedia:

He would often “bless” his recording equipment with mystical invocations, blow ganja smoke onto his tapes while recording, bury unprotected tapes in the soil outside of his studio, and surround himself with burning candles and incense, whose wax and dust remnants were allowed to infest his electronic recording equipment. He would also spray tapes with a variety of fluids, including urine, blood and whisky, ostensibly to enhance their spiritual properties. Later commentators have drawn a direct relationship between the decay of Perry’s facility and the unique sounds he was able to create from his studio equipment.

I don’t even know what the digital equivalent would be — opening music files in a text editor and inserting gibberish and secret messages to try to glitch the sound?

In his interview with Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, another producer famous for playing the studio like an instrument, spoke of being interested in that area between what humans can do and what machines can do.

The machines, without us, are without soul, but the machines, and our interactions with them, can also help us bring out the soul. There is a sense, at certain moments, that we are not just working in tandem, but the machine is leading us as much as we are leading it…

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