Collage is thinking on the page

Friday, January 31, 2020

For me, collage is the method that gets closest to depicting how I actually think on the page. (Next closest would be drawing, or, more specifically, comics, diagramming, mind-mapping, etc.) Writing, on the other hand, is conveying to others what I think on the page. There’s a difference.

So I was quite pleased when my friend Kio sent me this excerpt from Barbara Maria Stafford’s Visual Analogy: Consciousness As the Art of Connecting:

“Whether participating in a common outer life or making sense of the varieties of inner experience, understanding occurs as the consequence of an expenditure of psychic and physical energy compelling disparate things to converge. The inbetweenness of assemblage—those bodyobject amalgams composed of tossed scraps, found objects, organic and inorganic remnants—embodies this stunning spectrum of relocatable patterns available to human subjectivity. Collage, as the process of transforming ephemera by cutting and pasting them into momentarily stable configurations, continues to be a particularly effective technique for capturing the chimera of consciousness in action. We literally see how the brain organizes incoming visual stimuli by witnessing how perceptual organization begins by distinguishing salient features, to recombine bits and pieces and process them unequally in the mind’s eye.”

(Emphasis mine.)

29-day challenge

Friday, January 31, 2020

A few years ago, I gave up on New Year’s Resolutions. (April might be the cruelest month, but January feels like the longest.)

Now, if I make any resolutions at all, I make them in February. It’s short, therefore it brings the quickest sense of accomplishment to a new daily habit.

If you, too, would like to make a February resolution, here’s an easy, lo-fi way to keep track of your progress, adapted from the 30-day challenge in the The Steal Like An Artist Journal, and modified for the leap year:

Pick something small to do every day. Fill the boxes. Don’t break the chain!

Stealing moves

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Kobe Bryant died this week. I know next-to-nothing about basketball, but luckily when I was working on Steal Like An Artist back in 2011, my friend Matt Thomas clued me in to part of what made him such a good player:

Kobe’s interesting b/c, perhaps more than any other player, his game is based on his watching of videos of other players. Kobe’s gotten flack for this from players who learned to play “on the street” while he learned to play “watching tapes.” Kobe grew up overseas as part of the first generation where VHS tapes were ubiquitous. Tapes were his teachers.

Here’s what I wrote in chapter two of the book:

“There isn’t a move that’s a new move.” The basketball star Kobe Bryant has admitted that all of his moves on the court were stolen from watching tapes of his heroes. But initially, when Bryant stole a lot of those moves, he realized he couldn’t completely pull them off because he didn’t have the same body type as the guys he was thieving from. He had to adapt the moves to make them his own.

Kobe was far from the only player who stole moves.

Here’s Al Jefferson:

When I got to Boston I stole Paul Pierce’s ball fake. Tom Gugliotta used to kick my (butt) every day in practice my rookie year. It was always the same move – a turnaround jumper – so I stole that, (particularly) his footwork. Everyone I go against, if I like something they do, I steal it and put it in my own form.

“That’s the beauty of basketball,” said Mike Miller, in a NYTimes article about USA players importing “The Euro Step” move:

If you’re a basketball player and you want to get better, you’re going to take things from everybody. They take stuff from what we do. We take stuff from what they do.

What’s interesting is how technology continues to improve the ability of young players to study the masters who came before them.

“Where Kobe ‘stole’ Michael Jordan’s moves from watching him on VHS (e.g., “Playground” and “Come Fly with Me”), today’s young stars like Tatum ‘steal’ Kobe’s moves from YouTube,” Matt pointed out.

More from a 2018 WSJ story, “Why Are the NBA’s Best Players Getting Better Younger? YouTube”:

Tatum is young enough that he grew up with YouTube. There was never a time in his life that he couldn’t watch any clip of any NBA player any time he wanted.

“That’s how young I am,” Tatum said.

He was 7 when YouTube was invented, and it wasn’t long until he was searching for Kobe Bryant videos. “I’ve been watching Kobe ever since I can remember,” he said. But what made him the player he is today is not that Tatum simply watched Kobe. It was what he watched. And how he watched it. He studied Kobe.

Eventually, Tatum ran out of Kobe clips, and started studying other players, incorporating their swiped moves into his game.

(Another note from Matt: After his playing days were over, Kobe went into video analysis, showing others how to break down films the way he did.)

And so the game evolves. Allen Iverson, in a video about the crossover move, said:

I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be some guy who come along that’s gonna learn it and get it better than I got it and his is gonna be better than mine. Hopefully it’s my son.

Filed under: steal like an artist

How to turn your books into time capsules

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Years ago I borrowed this copy of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler from my father-in-law, and when I opened it up I found Calvino’s 1985 NYTimes obit and stories from a 1983 Harper’s.

I was so surprised and delighted by these unexpected artifacts that I decided to start saving clippings in my own books. Here’s my copy of John Ashbery’s They Knew What They Wanted, in which I stuffed a NYTimes review and a photo of his collage desk.

Here’s my copy of Lonesome Dove with a July 2010 Texas Monthly map of the plot of the book and my copy of Salt Fat Acid Heat with Wendy’s piece about writers’ snacks, “The Raw and the Cooked,” from 2011:

Saving clippings this way turns each book into a time capsule. The next time I open one of these books, a paper treasure will fall out. A little surprise for my future self. (Or whoever else cracks it open.)

“Time capsules are notoriously disappointing,” writes Sam Anderson in Boom Town. “They are supposed to be magic existential wormholes to a lost reality, but instead they are almost always empty, damaged, full of junk — further depressing evidence (as if we needed any) of the absolute tyranny of time.”

These time capsules, however, have never disappointed me. They always delight.

You can draw whatever you want (in memory of Jason Polan)

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Jason letting me look through his sketchbook at the Hotel San Jose, 2016

“It’s like, anyone can figure out how to draw something. But it’s hard to tell people how to see something.”
—Jason Polan

Of all places, I was in a hotel room in Crystal City, Virginia when I heard Jason died. I was trying to decide what to eat for lunch. I started crying. I typed “Taco Bell” into Google Maps. I stuffed a handkerchief in my back pocket and put on my sunglasses so I could keep crying. Then I walked to a mall in Pentagon City.

They say life is stranger than fiction, but life often feels like bad fiction. Stupid, over-the-top, a-little-too-on-the-nose fiction. I hadn’t walked a block when I passed a demolition site. Workers were spraying the building with a big jet of water to keep the dust down while a bulldozer tore it to pieces. The fencing around the site had been covered with multi-colored bicycles and inspirational phrases: “WHY NOT? BREATHE. EXPLORE.” I passed a glorious patch of pansies. (Oh, for crying out loud!)

When I got to the mall, I ordered a Crave Box with a Dr. Pepper and sat down in the food court to eat. It tasted really good. Then I made a drawing.

“If you draw at a Taco Bell, you’re a member,” Jason said, of Taco Bell Drawing Club. “There are no rules. I often draw people, but you can draw whatever you want.”

It was such a thrill to show up on Jason’s blog

When I got back to the hotel I was scheduled to do a Q&A in a room full of a hundred people. I told them a short version of what I’m about to tell you:

Jason was one of my favorite artists. He was, more importantly, a total mensch. A sweet, soft-spoken guy. I really liked his work and I really liked him.

A blackout poem I made above one of his drawings for The New York Times

He was born a year before I was and grew up one state away in Michigan. His art was the embodiment of so many of the things that I love. He believed in walking around and looking at everything and drawing what you saw. He paid attention. He did that thing that all my favorite artists do: He found magic in the mundane.

An ad Jason took out in *The* *New Yorker*

I think of him as a drawer, but he was a writer, too. He knew the power of words next to an image — if you look at his drawings, the captions are really what provide so much of the drawings with meaning. (I loved his long, rambling Instagram captions.)

He’s one of the few artists whose work I happily hang in my office and also in my kids’ room. He seemed to have that kind of child-like spirit that really gifted drawers are able to hold onto. I once complimented him on his drawing, and he tweeted back, “I feel my drawings have gone downhill since I was about five.”

The last time I saw Jason was in the summer of 2018. I was in New York for no more than 24 hours, and I randomly bumped into him while browsing the gift shop at the Whitney. I remember he apologized about how sweaty he was from walking around. “Otherwise, I’d give you a hug!”

We only got to visit for a few minutes and then I had to hop a cab over to Brooklyn to get my picture taken. (I don’t remember this part, but my diary from that day says: “I told him I loved seeing the world through his eyes — he seemed touched that I said that.”) I had no idea until a few days later that he’d drawn this picture of me:

It made me so happy to think of him out in the world with his Strathmore pad and a Uniball, scratching away, maybe stopping for a slice of pizza. I can’t believe he’s gone. My heart goes out to his family and friends. I’m so grateful for his work and I’m glad to have known him.