Search Results for: log book

Do nothing for as long as possible

Thursday, December 17, 2020

I sent this Oblique Strategy to a friend who asked what he should do on his 3-week vacation.

The nerd that I am, I have a small library of books about doing nothing: Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle and The Idle Parent, Roman Muradov’s On Doing Nothing, Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, etc.

Even though I feel an enormous laziness in me, I find after about one afternoon of doing nothing I’m ready to go back to work. My laziness is somehow connected to my productivity, like they’re two poles, keeping my life’s rope tight enough to walk on. (Tim Kreider: “I’m the most ambitious lazy person I know.”)

I used to laugh at my friend John T. Unger when he said “relaxing makes me tense,” but it’s making more sense as I get older. I prefer drawing to meditation and walking to sitting still.

It helps that I play for a living, so I don’t need much of a break from The Work.

What I’d really like is a break from work with a lowercase “w”: answering emails, scheduling interviews, making deals, etc.

But that stuff I can always blow off for an afternoon or two.

No vacation needed.

Tales of Beethoven

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

“Art alone deterred me. How could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?”
—Ludwig van Beethoven

Today is Beethoven’s 250th birthday! Well, nobody knows for sure what day he was actually born, but he was baptized on Dec. 17th, so Dec. 16th is generally accepted as the day we celebrate him. (Check out all the Peanuts strips about Beethoven’s birthday on this wonderful site about Charles Schulz’s use of classical music. I would love to turn this into a book.)

a page from the massive Russian hardcover edition of my book, *Show Your Work!*

Classical music can be hard to get into for a lot of people. One thing that has helped me is to read stories about the composers and what they got up to. (Composer Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirits is a great starting point.)

Beethoven is ridiculously fun to read about. He’s one of those musical artists who is so ubiquitous and popular that I never really got around to studying him, but once I did, holy moly, he became one of my favorites. Not because his tumultuous life is something to emulate. He was abused as a child and was notoriously difficult and ugly and sometimes abusive in his personal life. (The last musical notes Beethoven ever wrote were next to the words, “We all err, but each one errs differently.”) Like Bach, who also had a rough childhood, the fact that he was able to make such beautiful music out of such emotional chaos is remarkable.

The problem with Beethoven biographies are that some of them are absolutely massive. (Swafford’s acclaimed bio is over a thousand pages.) Years ago, I picked up John Suchet’s 300-page Beethoven: A Man Revealed, and it felt more than enough to whet my appetite. (The excerpts below are all Suchet.)

The rest of this post is some of my favorite Beethoven stories:

a portrait of Beethoven by my son Jules, drawn at age 4

The funny thing about Beethoven is that many of the myths you’ve heard are actually true.

First off, it’s true that he was mostly deaf when he wrote his most glorious music, including the 9th symphony and the late quartets, which is totally freaking mindblowing to me.

Another thing people overlook when they get hung up on the deaf-guy-writing-music thing; they see the music through an abled lens, in which the deafness is something that Beethoven overcame, not something in which the deafness actually led to unique creative decisions!

— ? sharon su is on bluesky ? (@doodlyroses) December 17, 2019

He was so deaf he carried a notebook around and had people write their questions in it so he could have conversations:

one of Beethoven’s conversation notebooks, which I cover in my talk about notebooks

…his deafness led him to carry a notebook, so-called “conversation books,” for people to write down their questions. His nephew Karl wrote in one of these, “You knew Mozart, where did you see him?” And in other conversation book a few years later, “Was Mozart a good pianoforte player?” It [the instrument] was then still in its infancy.”

Of course the utterly maddening, infuriating, frustrating fact is that Beethoven spoke rather than wrote his answer, so we have no idea of what he said.

a page of my diary (this story made it into my book *Keep Going*)

It’s also true that Beethoven was sort of a slob and he looked totally crazy at times, waving his arms, composing in his head, and shouting to be heard.

In fact, he once got arrested by the police when he got lost in the suburbs of Vienna and he started peeking in people’s windows to try to orient himself. A local musician had to be brought into the police station to identify him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnCn81FbhLs

You did not want to rent a room to Beethoven:

There were, certainly, instances of him being expelled from a lodging because of complaints from other residents about his habit of working through the night, pounding on the piano keys to try to hear his music, banging on the apartment walls. He had to leave one apartment after getting in a stonemason to knock a hole in a wall and install a window to give him a decent view, without permission from his landlord.

(My kids adore the Beethoven Lives Upstairs, which is based on these stories.)

another portrait of Beethoven by my son Jules, drawn at age 4

You did not want to challenge Beethoven to a piano duel: he once embarrassed a guy named Daniel Steibelt so bad that Steibelt had to leave Vienna. He never came back.

Me: Do you think Beethoven drove a pickup truck?

Toddler: No, he just played the piano.

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 6, 2016

You probably didn’t want to mess with Beethoven in general.

He once told a critic: “What I shit is better than anything you have ever thought.”

He once stood outside of a palace shouting that his patron, living inside, was a donkey.

Another time, he broke a chair over a patron’s head and then got mad when the dude wouldn’t give him any more money.

an engraving of Beethoven his friends said looked the most like him

But my all-time favorite Beethoven story is one of sibling rivalry.

Beethoven’s brother once ended a letter, “From your brother Johann, Landowner.” Beethoven ended his reply with, “From your brother Ludwig, Brain Owner.”

Sick music and sick burns!

Speaking of siblings: one of the reasons I know so much about Beethoven and I’m a classic geek now is that my sons got obsessed with Welcome To Symphony, a book that explains the orchestra by using Symphony No. 5. Here’s an orchestra drawing they collaborated on:

My oldest hummed the opening Symphony No. 5 so much I put little pieces of cheat tape on his tiny toy piano:

Of course, nothing compares to hearing an orchestra perform Beethoven. One of the highlights of my musical life was watching Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic rehearse the 9th symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2015:

Anyways, I dig Beethoven and you should check him out if you haven’t.

The one tricky thing about his music, his symphonies in particular, is that they’re terrible background music. They’re so dynamic and intense they demand your attention.

Kid at playground: Jesus is dead!

My kid: So is Beethoven!

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) October 1, 2017

So if you want to just Chill With Beethoven, or try something not so popular, try the late quartets.

This playlist Teju Cole made is also lovely:

The stories are great, but nothing beats the music.

The comfort of a pencil

Friday, December 11, 2020

“I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones.”
—Patricia Lockwood

I’m at the buy fancy pencils based purely on the aesthetics of the box phase of quarantine.

(Above: two boxes of Mitsu-Bishis and a box of Tombows. Not shown: a box of Bear Claws I bought for my kids. Oh, how I wish I could visit C.W. Pencil Enterprise in NYC right now!)

I didn’t really care much for pencils until a few years ago when my friend Clive Thompson (author of Coders and Smarter Than You Think) turned me onto Blackwing Palaminos. I love those pencils and try to always have one on me, particularly for marginalia and marking up books.

The pencil is a wonderful piece of technology. (Did you know that pencil marks in a notebook will survive a washing machine?)

Here’s Sam Anderson:

In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.

A pencil hero of mine is Edward Carey, who has drawn a portrait every day of quarantine with one of his beloved Tombow Bs.

Edward says:

There is something so comforting about a blank piece of paper and the lines the pencil can make upon it. The pencil is such a humble object but such a versatile one: It can make very faint marks or the blackest black. It is also very forgiving: If you make a mistake, you can rub it out. A pencil can be anything, and drawing requires no great setup—just a piece of paper and a sharpener, and then it can be kings or trolls, philosophers or grackles.

When I saw a show of Edward’s at the Austin Public Library, he displayed his Tombow stubs in an ashtray. (He used to be a smoker.) This amused me, because I often “smoke” a cigarette pencil:

I’ve become such a nerd I bought pencil extenders, which seem ridiculous, but make every pencil 100% better by extending their life and giving you a big fat grip.

And for sharpening, I use my friend Carl, who brightens any table top:

Of course, some pencils you never want to sharpen, like this pencil my friend Katie gave me in college:

You never know where you’ll find a good pencil! The Blanton Museum doesn’t allow pens in the galleries, so they have these plain ol’ #2 golf pencils, which have an almost waxy lead that’s pretty nice to mark with (I keep a pencil in the elastic band of my pocket notebook):

And, indeed, as Edward notes, “a pencil can be anything.” Here are some pots made out of pencils by artist Nick Zammeti:

Here’s a video of how he makes them:

Graphite, it turns out, is a great conductor:

TIL that the graphite in pencils is conductive ??? pic.twitter.com/HqLMRElHcd

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) August 4, 2017

Pencils can tell jokes with unintended messages:

There are all kinds of pencils! Here’s John Waters with his mustache pencil, which he carries with him at all times (photo by Hayley Campbell):

There’s a lot more to be said for pencils (and their sharpening), for sure, but I’ll end this post with John Baldessari’s “The Pencil Story”:

Related reading: “HBs are for architects”

Quantity leads to quality (the origin of a parable)

Thursday, December 10, 2020

One of my favorite parables about creative work comes from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear:

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Like any great parable, it’s the specificity of image that makes it work for me: You can picture the dusty pottery studio, the scales, weighing all the crummy pots and failed experiments.

It makes me think of the actor Seth Rogen, who joined a pottery studio with his wife last year and has been showing his work by posting pictures of his creations on Instagram:

So it was puzzling to me a few months ago when I read James Clear’s Atomic Habits and he retold the parable, but using a photography class:

ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.

“What in the hell?” I thought. Why would you move from something like pottery, which is more concrete, to photography, which is more abstract? (What makes a photo good is more subjective than what makes a pot good — you can still hang a blurry photo in a gallery, but you can’t drink out of a cracked mug.)

Then I noticed an asterisk at the end of Clear’s telling and checked the endnotes. Turns out he had emailed with Ted Orland in 2016, and learned the true origin of the parable:

“Yes, the ‘ceramics story’ in ‘Art & Fear’ is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in ‘Art & Fear’ it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).”

(Ted Orland, by the way, was an assistant to Ansel Adams.)

Regardless of the form of the parable, the moral has certainly been true with my own work, especially writing and blogging. The frequency of my work — showing up at regular intervals, without worrying about results — has actually lead to better results.

Quantity leads to quality.

The Vampire Test

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Here’s an animated excerpt from my audiobook about a test that will tell you who and what you should let in and out of your life. (Also on Instagram.)

https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1336388678122344450

It may be easier or harder to practice during a pandemic, depending on your situation. (I often joke in talks, “Children don’t count. Their job is to suck you dry.”)

I got the idea for the test from a story in John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3). Brancusi, who’d had several of his sculptural ideas ripped off from Pablo, “was anything but an admirer of Picasso or his work”:

[He] disapproved of [one of] of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picasso is a cannibal,” Brancusi said. He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso.

I also cribbed a little from this Lynda Barry interview:

My friend Frank Chimero pointed out this is also #3 on Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work, “SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.”

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

What’s really funny is that the book came out in 2014, way before the What We Do In The Shadows show, which features one of my all-time favorite characters, Colin Robinson, a self-proclaimed “energy vampire”: