Austin Kleon

A bird feeder for humans

Maria Bamford’s bench

From Rob Walker’s excellent newsletter companion to his book The Art of Noticing:

The other day I was listening to an interview with Maria Bamford (one of my favorite comedians) on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn (a great interviewer), and there was a passing mention of Bamford installing a bench in front of her house. This was intended to attract interesting people, and did. (Not always in a good way, apparently.)

This sounded crazy (in a good way) to me, so I looked into it a bit. Here’s a passage from a 2014 New York Times Magazine profile:

A few years ago, after reading in a book that people who feel a strong sense of community have been proven to lead longer and happier lives, Bamford started working to overcome her natural shyness and fear of interaction by saying hello to her neighbors in Eagle Rock, a diverse and partly gentrified area on the northeastern edge of Los Angeles. She bought a park bench and had it installed on the median strip in front of her house. She then spray-stenciled the words “Have a Seat!” on the sidewalk in front of it. To her delight, the bench is often occupied. “It’s like a birdfeeder for humans,” she says.

I read that two weeks ago, just a few days before my kids got sick and we started self-quarantining. It seemed like such a sweet idea! Now, of course, a bird feeder for humans sounds like a potential site of contagion, but it won’t always be that way, and I still like thinking about the bird feeders for humans I’ve seen in my own neighborhood. (This website called Little Free Libraries “bird feeders for readers.”)

My favorite bird feeder for humans in my neighborhood is a house that has a chicken coop in their side yard. (We’ve bought eggs from them — they’re great.) So many people stop to see the chickens that they started putting a bucket out with leafy greens to feed them. A bird feeder for humans feeding chickens! Chicken feeding for the soul…

Drawing with kids


I know lots of parents are stuck at home with kiddos right now, so I thought I’d put together a big list of my favorite resources for drawing with kids. (If you’re stuck creatively, by the way, nothing helps like drawing with a 4-year-old.) I’ll start with instructional books and videos, and move on to supplies.

Instruction

Ed Emberley’s books


My all-time favorite drawing book is Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World, which takes a collage-like approach to drawing:


Here’s a sample of one of the spreads:


If they like Make A World, there’s a ton of other Emberley books for them to get into.


And here is a short documentary for kids to get to know the wonderful man behind the books.

Super Simple Draw


Think of Super Simple Draw as a kind of animated version of Ed Emberley’s books. My kids love to sit side-by-side and follow the directions. There’s a couple seasons on Amazon Prime, but there’s also a ton of videos on YouTube.

Here’s their video for how to draw a robot:

And here are some drawings from when Owen was 5 and Jules was 3:

Lynda Barry’s books


Nobody has taught me more about the magic of drawing than the queen, Ms. Lynda Barry. Her latest book, Making Comics, is filled with exercises perfect for kids of all ages, but I love everything she’s done. Most recently, she’s posted some draw along videos to her YouTube channel.

Here’s a video of Lynda talking about how anyone can draw:

Here’s how to draw a chicken:

And here’s Lynda drawing a cat, a turtle, and a dog.

Lunch doodles with Mo Willems

I love Willems’s books and these Lunch Doodles not only provide a drawing lesson, Willems also shows off his studio and talks about the process of making the books. (They’re all archived on Youtube.)

Other great illustrators who are sharing lessons on their Instagrams: @wendymac, @carsonellis, and @mikelowerystudio.

Supplies

Art supplies are some of the best gifts you can give kids, but so many art supplies made for kids are straight-up junk. Here’s some stuff my my boys love that isn’t terribly expensive:

Crayola Slick Stix

Regular crayons are cheap and they don’t make a mess, but they’re hard to hold in tiny hands and kids have to really press hard with them to get any kind of decent result.

These Slick Stix are easy to grip and they lay down a really silky smooth line.

Give some of these to your kids along with some big pieces of paper and pretty soon you’ll have a bunch of Jean-Michel Basquiats to hang around the house.

Box of single-color Crayola Markers

 

This tip comes from my wife:

If your kid has a favorite color of marker, instead of buying another 8-color pack from Target or wherever, go online and buy a box of a single color in bulk.

(Our youngest goes through a ton of black.)

Do-A-Dot Markers

My youngest son had trouble making circles early on, so he loved to use these for wheels on cars, faces, etc.

They’re a little expensive, but they last a long time.  (Try the exercises in Ed Emberley’s Funprint Drawing Book or copying pages from Little Blue and Little Yellow).

If you print them on top of each other, they mix color, so you can do a little Toddler Color Theory.

Sidewalk chalk

If you have a sidewalk, a driveway, or a concrete porch (see above) give them some sidewalk chalk and kick their butts outside.

Don’t forget paper. Lots and lots of paper.

Worry less about the quality and more about the quantity. We just go to Costco and buy whatever gigantic boxes of cheap copy paper they have and let the kids use as much as they want. (People would probably be shocked if they knew how much paper our 4-year-old goes through. But it’s worth it.) My friend buys paper for next-to-nothing in thrift and re-use stores.

Happy drawing!

Mary Ruefle on the joy of blackout poetry

Mary Ruefle, A Little White Shadow

I love, love, love this part of Mary Ruefle’s long conversation with Ron Charles when she talks about A Little White Shadow and how she makes her erasure poems. (Basically the White Out version of blackout poetry.)

Here’s how she says she gets started:

All the words rise up and they hover a quarter inch above the page. It’s like a field, and they’re hovering. I don’t actually read the page. I read the words, which is different. So I’m looking, and I see all the words. And I go in and I pick a phrase or a word that’s delicious that I really love.

On how much she loves doing them:

I find it meditative and I find it infuriating sometimes and challenging and I like the smell of the White Out — dreadfully toxic! Really toxic…. I love it. Oh, I love it so much. There is nothing like it on Earth. I’m crazy about it.

Despite the haters:

A lot of people hate them… I’ve talked to people who just, “Why do you waste your time doing that?” Because it’s fun and I love it. That’s why.

The whole interview is wonderful and worth watching. Love her:

In praise of watching your favorite movies in black and white


Back in 2014, director Steven Soderbergh posted a black-and-white version of Raiders of the Lost Ark with The Social Network soundtrack as an exercise in studying staging. It’s since become my favorite way of watching the movie. I’ve seen Raiders probably a 100 times and I can recite the dialogue line-by-line, but when I watch it in black-in-white, it estranges me from it, and it’s like seeing a new movie. (Fresh eyes!)


“I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this,” Soderbergh joked. But some directors insist that black-and-white is actually their favorite way to watch their own movies. “The best version of this movie is black-and-white,” said director George Miller on the “Black and Chrome” edition of Mad Max: Fury Road. “But people reserve that for art movies now.”


Director Bong Joon-ho says his mother wouldn’t let him go to the movies because of “bacteria” when he was growing up, so he watched all movies on their old black-and-white TV. A “classic” movie, for him, is a black-and-white one. So he made a black-and-white version of Parasite, which had a limited theatrical release. “The first time [I saw the black and white version], it felt like I was watching an old movie, a story from long ago. But the second time, the movie felt more intense; it felt [more] cruel.”

Last night my wife and I put on Jurassic Park, and a little bit into it I said, “I’ll bet this would look really good in black-and-white.” So I opened the picture settings on the TV, turned the Color to zero, set the Contrast all the way up, then turned down the Brightness down to about 40/100. I couldn’t believe how good it looked — all the rain and the smoke from Samuel L. Jackson’s cigarette in the control room made it feel almost noir-ish. (And it definitely emphasized the horror elements.)  An old movie becomes new. Magic!

Update (3/29/2020): You may be surprised what works and what doesn’t! The Big Lebowski was underwhelming, but Nacho Libre in black and white was perfect — parts of it looked like Bergman or Fellini and the parts in the ring looked like Raging Bull!

And @jregan informs me that The Princess Bride in B&W is inconceivable!

The best parenting advice I’ve ever heard

My wife is the oldest of four kids. Her parents were once asked at a birthing class if they had any advice for the rookies.

My father-in-law stood up and addressed the group:

“Look, you’re going to want to throw it out the window… and that’s okay! The important thing is that you don’t.”

Then he sat back down.

After all these years, it’s still the greatest parenting advice I’ve ever heard.

(I thought the advice and this zine spoke to each other.)

5 good books I read this winter


It was a light, lovely winter for me (well, most of it) and I spent it reading at whim.

Here are five books that stand out:

A Little History of the World 
E.H. Gombrich

Gombrich is probably best known for his art history survey, The Story of Art, but he wrote this book before, in pre-Nazi Germany. When a textbook publisher hired him to translate a history book for kids, he thought it was so bad he could write a better one himself. So he read all day and wrote a chapter each night until the book was done. I love the way he starts and begins the book with visual metaphors to help kids picture history. [Buy indie]

 

Boom Town
Sam Anderson

Sam is one of my favorite working writers, but I didn’t really care much about Oklahoma City or basketball when I picked it up. And yet, I loved this book. While reading it I was like, “Is this as good as I think it is or is Sam nuts in the same way I am nuts or have I been driven nuts by reading it?” One thing I cannot get enough of is the sense when you’re reading a book that the author had a blast writing it — that they let themselves get carried away and went for the ride and wrangled the thing in just the right way so you could strap in, too. [Buy indie]

 

Normal People
Sally Rooney

Every year I try to read a bestseller that everybody’s talking about. Last year it was Educated, this year it was Normal People. It’s easy to see why Educated was a hit — it’s written well, it has an Oprah-style arc de triumph, and it confirms the dominant cultural narrative about the importance of formal education. But this book? The whole time I read this book, I was thinking, “Why am I so into this?” I think it’s the way Rooney manages to describe contemporary emotions (ew), but, like Educated,  I also think there’s magic in the pacing and the chunking. Hey man, no need to overthink it: If you’re turning the pages, it’s good. [Buy indie]

 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk

Combination detective story and fairy tale with a huge dose of astrology  and William Blake thrown in. (It gets its title from Proverbs of Hell.) A great winter’s tale. Definitely picking up her novel Flights soon — loved this excerpt. [Buy indie]

 


Mystery Train
Greil Marcus

If I had read this book when I was 19, it would probably hold a super high place in my personal canon. The thing that holds me back from outright adoration is my (perhaps unreasonably) low opinion of Elvis. I love the parts about the tension between artist and audience. I will probably go back and try to get through Lipstick Traces again this year. [Buy indie]

It strikes me, looking at this list, that every single one of these books was read on my Kindle. I think this is the first time this has happened and I don’t know how to feel about it. On the one hand, I much prefer reading on paper, with a pencil, but on the other, ebooks are so convenient, they allow me to flit and flirt and read promiscuously.

By the way, here are 5 other good books I read this winter:

More of my reading years here.

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