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Ideas spread like the plague

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Woodcut from *A Rod for Runaways* by Thomas Dekker, 1625

A passage from Ted Gioia’s How To Listen To Jazz:

Strange to say, new art forms are similar to the plague or a virulent flu in how they spread. Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both. Densely packed populations, many individuals coming and going via land and waterways, an overheated mixture of people recently arrived from different locales, informal settings where they intermingle in close contact, a culture and environment that emphasize communal activities and get-togethers—these are nightmare conditions for anyone trying to stop an epidemic, but they are the same ingredients that can spur world-changing artistic revolutions.

Jazz, for example, emerged in New Orleans, “one of the unhealthiest cities in the world.” “The first jazz records were released shortly after the 1918 flu epidemic decimated the city.” But before that, the Renaissance emerged around the time the Black Death was spreading through Florence. Plagues in London around Shakespeare’s time. “We talk nowadays of cultural memes going viral, but this isn’t just a poetic way of speaking.”

“Influence and influenza in fact have the same etymology,” notes Elisa Gabbert in her essay, “The Great Mortality,” collected in her forthcoming book, The Unreality of Memory:

“Pandemic” sounds to me like automatic hyperbole, like “pandemonium,” but it’s fairly well defined in epidemiology: Unlike an “outbreak,” which affects limited people in a limited area for a short time, or an “epidemic,” which affects a larger number of people in multiple areas at the same time, “pandemics affect many people in many parts of the world at the same time.”

(It would be interesting to map artistic movements to these terms.)

I’m thinking now of maps of scenius, the networks or scenes that lead to artistic movements, and how much they resemble the maps of viruses spreading:

(Clockwise from top left: a page from Show Your Work!, a MoMA map of modernism, a screenshot of a video game called Pandemic, a Harper’s diagram of the romantic and sexual activity in a midwestern high school.)

Here is a diagram of the spread of SARS, taken from Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. And an example from the same book, the cover of Cubism and Abstract Art:

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

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.

A brief appreciation of John Baldessari

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

John Baldessari died.

Last night I played my 7-year-old Supermarché’s short documentary about him, “A Brief History of John Baldessari.” (Wonderfully narrated by Tom Waits!) Owen laughed the whole way through it, pronounced it “the funniest video I’ve ever seen,” and requested that we watch it again.

Watch it, it’s great:

Off the top of my head, here are seven things in John Baldessari’s work that I think about a lot:

1. Pictures and words together to make a third thing.

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer. I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.”

2. Bringing a sense of lightness and humor to art.

He said he didn’t try to be funny, but he was. “I’m blessed with a well-developed sense of absurdity—it’s what saved me.”

(I love that he had a drawing of Spongebob and a note from Stephen Hillenburg hanging in his studio.)

3. Teaching as making a space for learning to happen.

“I taught because I needed the money,” he said, “but I tried to keep it interesting by making teaching as much like art as I could.”

(See his brilliant list of assignments in the book Draw It With Your Eyes Closed.)

“I found out that you can’t really teach art, you can just sort of set the stage for it.”

One of my favorite stories about his teaching: he’d have a student throw a dart at a map of LA and they’d all go to the spot and hang out all day for inspiration, taking pictures and videos.

“When I think I’m teaching, I’m probably not,” he said. “When I don’t think I’m teaching, I probably am.”

4. Learning about art from little kids.

“I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.”

5. Salvaging from the mess.

“I’m just messy, I don’t put things away,” he said. “I don’t throw things away in my mind, either; I keep them there.”

From his NYTimes obit:

His father was a salvage dealer, and the family grew its own fruits and vegetables, raised chickens and rabbits, and practiced composting waste. Mr. Baldessari often cited his childhood as a reason he had a hard time throwing anything away.

“It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. “I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?”

“Maybe because I’m tall and gangly, I’ve always considered myself an assembly of parts.”

6. Los Angeles. (Or: how “ugly” cities can be inspiring.)

Palm Trees (Near)” by John Baldessari, 1975

“I live here because L.A. is ugly… If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art?” he said. “I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that.”

7. Subtraction

“Nam June Paik said, ‘What I love about your work is what you leave out’—that was a really nice compliment.”

He even once had all of his work cremated so he could start afresh.

RIP.

PS. After writing this all up, I realized all 7 of these are also things I love about Corita Kent.

100 things that made my year (2019)

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Moving back to Texas.
Publishing a book that genuinely felt like the best I could do.
Surviving book tour. Filling seats. Meeting so many lovely people at readings. How many people brought their kids—or their parents! Having a portable routine. Sending the kids postcards. Writing in diners. Art at the airport. My Yeti Rambler. Noise-cancelling headphones. A Tupperware for Tacodeli. Ziplocs for a pastrami from Katz’s Deli. The hearse I spotted in Portland, Oregon. Walking Lake Michigan in Chicago. Watching dudes surf Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. Amtrak! (The Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Francisco — snow in the mountains, meeting kooky people in the dining car and on the observation deck!) Listening to the Magnetic Fields’ Charm of the Highway Strip and watching the Maysles Brothers’ documentary about Bible salesmen for moral support. The Jonas Wood show at the DMA. Walking to an open mic night at a comedy club after my talk in Atlanta. Finding out the Mississippi starts in Minnesota. Dairy Queen with Matt and Jennifer in Iowa after a tornado. The sad gallery of photos I took of my hotel room number. Getting picked up from the airport by the whole family.
Walker Percy’s “problems of re-entry.”
How cheap wine tastes better if you drink it out of a juice glass.
Pansy Luchadores!
My Gritty mug.
Living down the street from a great thrift store.
Buying used CDs until hipsters like me make them expensive again.
$5 crave boxes from Taco Bell and $5 sushi from the grocery store.
Suppressing the internal voices of our Midwestern upbringing and learning to accept hospitality from others.
Playing Gerren’s Wurlitzer while watching the inflatable T-Rex float around his pool.
Gas fireplaces that ignite with the flip of a switch.
All the members of our household being potty-trained!
The color of the sky in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Driving through the desert from LA to Las Vegas. A tour of The Neon Museum boneyard with Steve Siwinski. The Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas.
The smell of my wife baking sourdough bread. Watching the kids devour it.
Loving what we do in front of the kids. Showing them an alternate world. Giving them the time, space, and materials to make their own. Trying not to give them too much advice. Trying to help them understand we don’t know everything, we just usually know where to look for it.
Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers. Edward Gorey’s The West Wing.
Owls. Goats. Chickens. Big wolf energy.
Vitamin D.
My new office. Keeping sketchbooks in drawers. My old trusty brush pen.
Backing up.
Getting in bed at 9PM.
The Kids section of The New York Times.
Watching Phantom Thread for the sixth time. (And chasing it with Hitchcock’s Rebecca.)
Sandy Cheeks singing about Texas. Buying my wife so many stocking stuffers from Texas Humor.
Watching Gourmet Makes on YouTube with Meg. Getting drunk and making fun of old clips of Jacques Pépin and Julia Child on PBS.
The Red Hand Files. The return of POME. The “Just trust me” links in Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter.
Our trip to upstate New York. Visiting John Unger’s studio. (Keeping a notebook handy when he’s talking.) The drive from Hudson to Manhattan. How good New York City can be with kids. Sitting in a hotel room in with Meg, drinking, eating pizza, and watching a crane in the street lift gigantic concrete blocks up 50 stories. Seeing Joe Brainard’s collages in person at Tibor de Nagy.
The kids slurping ramen noodles.
California. Driving the outskirts of San Francisco with Ted in the purple limousine. Sunsets over the ocean. Waking up in the Presido. The smell of Eucalyptus. Rodeo beach. Sushi Ran in Sausalito. Mission burritos. Purisma Creek preserve. Grace Cathedral. The moon over the Sutro tower. Los Angeles. Shenkrila. Finding Christoph Niemann’s Hopes and Dreams on my sister-in-law’s coffee table. Watching a seagull on a beach playground in Encinitas pick up a whole In-N-Out drink carrier in its beak and fly away. (And assuming this happens every day.)
Driving the length of Kentucky with my mom. Stopping at Keeneland for BLTs. Seeing a handprinted sign that read: “INDOOR YARD SALE.”
Buc-ees!!!
Remembering that everybody just got here. Remembering that you do not have to be good, you just have to be kind.
A cherry coke and loaded fries at the Alamo Drafthouse.
Taking my pocket notebook to the playground and doodling while my kids play.
Watching two of my favorite writers share their drawings on Twitter: @marykarrlit and @nicholsonbaker8.
Giving up on pourover and just buying a freaking coffeemaker. (My favorite coffee drink: Discovering there’s still coffee in the carafe 3 hours later and adding ice cubes and a splash of Oatly!)
Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” in Severance Hall.
Owen’s first concert: Carly Rae Jepsen from the opera box at the House of Blues in Cleveland.
Nachos for dinner.
Talking on the phone.
Cherishing every one of your old friends because you’re now at the age when it’s really hard to make new ones.
Bill Callahan at Scholz Garden with Christy.
The monarch butterflies making their way through Austin.
Input and output. Eno’s idea of “import and export.”
Edinburgh, Scotland. Walking the Water of Leith path. Climbing to Arthur’s Seat. The collage show at the Modern. Discovering the work of Eduardo Paolozzi.
Joni Mitchell singing “Coyote” in Rolling Thunder Review.
Walking along the water in Vancouver.
Making a collage or drawing in my diary before I write in it.
Finally understanding the moon phases.
Worrying about lineage instead of legacy.
Thinking about two homeschooled kids named Billie and Finneas making the most-streamed album of the year in their bedrooms.
Prismacolor Ebony pencils and Art Gum erasers.
Watching California Typewriter and later finding a 1980s Smith-Corona at Goodwill for $14.
The week after we moved, when we didn’t have furniture or internet, but we were so happy to be back home we didn’t care. Sleeping on air mattresses. Typing on the typewriter. Sitting on milk crates and playing Uno and checkers. Drinking beer. (The closest these indoorspeople will probably get to camping.)
Bunk beds!
Date days while the boys are at school. Clam chowder at Clarks. Van’s Bahn Mi trailer. Bubble tea and shopping at Kinokuniya.
Getting beyond survival mode.
Staying married for 13 years.
Picking Owen up from school and letting him DJ on the ride home.
Going to the movies when everybody else is at work. (Highlights: riding the #5 bus to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, a 10 a.m. showing of Knives Out with Meg followed by a sushi lunch, and John Wick 3 with Meg in an old school sticky floor Cleveland suburbs movie theater with popcorn and a Dr. Pepper.)
Going to see movies I don’t even care about just for the company. (Terminator: Dark Fate with Gerren. Star Wars with Hawk. Downton Abbey at the Drafthouse with my mom.)
Good movies at home. Booksmart. Sorcerer. The Favourite. The Worricker Trilogy. Destination Wedding. Herzog’s Nosferatu. The Andy Goldsworthy documentaries, Rivers and Tides and Leaning Into The Wind. Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization. John Wick 2 in Spanish on Telemundo.
Taking a chance because you’re stuck on an airplane and the movies turning out to be really good: Free Solo. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.
Ignoring baseball all year but watching the World Series, no matter who is playing. (Is that like only going to church on Christmas?)
Overnight road trip to Detroit without the kids. A stop for window shopping and lunch at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. Bill Callahan at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Saying hi to Brian Beattie and hoping the next time I said hi to him it would be back in Austin. (It was.) Champagne sent up from the front desk. Hearing “Sticky” in the elevator. Actually sleeping in together.
Downloading MIDI files of symphonies and dumping them into Garageband so Owen can make electronic versions.
Moonlight on my bedsheets.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
Practicing the religion of walking. Walking to Friendsgiving. Walking in cemeteries. Believing that “everything is within walking distance… if you have the time.”
Spending October evenings reading Japanese Ghost Stories and watching spooky old school black and white movies, like The Black Cat and The Old Dark House and stuff from the Universal Monsters set.
Thinking about grace. The Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace. Jeffrey Gibson’s “Amazing Grace.” Leonard Cohen’s state of grace.
Not hoarding art supplies. Filling a notebook or using up a glue stick and going to the store and buying a new one.
Bagels from Nervous Charlie’s.
The opening line of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk: “I was a wonderful parent before I had children.”
Hanging out with the boys. Taking them to good museums. The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The Blanton. Griffith Observatory in LA. Drawing in our sketchbooks. Watching Roadrunner and Spongebob. Laughing at Cinderblock. Running outside to check out the morning moon. Making marble runs. Kicking the soccer ball. Knocking down dominos while filming in slow-motion. Shooting stomp rockets. Wishing on stars. Swim lessons. Listening patiently to my stuttering son while talks about Minecraft because I’m trying to be a good listener and a curious elder. The kids getting into poetry. Making art together. Having Owen letter my book trailer. How mad Jules got when I added the wrong words to his drawings. Block prints. Wearing masks. Making zines. Comics jams. Putting scabs on a banana. (Shudders.) Recording on my old 4-track. Owen naming our band “Song Disease.” His Soundcloud. Trick or treating. (It was actually fun?) Watching Jules draw. Jules singing “Away in a Manger” in the sweetest voice you ever heard. Teaching him how to play the first four notes of the 5th symphony. Jules teaching himself to read. How they get me unstuck.
Screen Time. Kanopy kids.
Having an active library card from 3 different library systems.
Drawing plants.
Leftover Torchy’s queso on a baked potato.
Looking around and asking myself, “Who’s having fun?”
Recording another KUTX DJ set with Art Levy.
Great books. Reading what I want to read. Re-reading all of Charles Portis’s novels. Trusting the simple act of turning pages. Keeping my phone off and reading books we’ve bought for the kids at the breakfast table. Falling asleep to library ebooks on my Kindle Paperwhite.
Keeping a Peanuts desk calendar on the kitchen table for us all to read.
Songs that got me through bad days: Lizzo’s “Juice.” Robyn’s “Honey.” Kacey Musgraves’ “Neon Moon.” New Order’s “Your Silent Face.” The Animals’ “It’s My Life.” Brittany Howard’s “Stay High.” Prince’s “Erotic City.” Prince’s “Xtralovable” in the car.
Less feed, more search.
Good albums. Bill and Billie. Purple Mountains. Working to Neu! ’75 and Cate le Bon’s Reward. Plane rides with Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, Harald Grosskopf’s Synthesist, and Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? as the soundtrack. Walking around in the frozen winter to Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Jonathan Richman’s I, Jonathan in the car. Stomping around to Idles’ Joy as an Act of Resistance. The 1999 super deluxe box set.
Being cool with being known for writing about making art more than my actual art.
Mechanics who hate cars.
Kintsugi. Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture.”
David Shrigley’s Instagram narrating my life.
Good poems. Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning.” “Poem” by Joe Brainard. “Berryman” by W.S. Merwin. “Haiku” by Ron Padgett. “The Best of It” by Kay Ryan. A haiku by Mizuta Masahide. Faith Shearin’s “Scurvy.” Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, 4.” Jane Kenyon’s “Taking Down The Tree.” Owen reciting Philip Larkin’s “Next, Please.”
Reading about my father-in-law in The New Yorker.
Lynda Barry finally getting a MacArthur.
Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker. Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Sam Anderson’s profile of Rick Steves. Jody Rosen on the Universal fire. Emma Hunsinger’s “How to draw a horse.” Sean T. Collins’ 365 days of Road House. Malaka Gharib’s mini zines. Tim Kreider’s pieces on Medium. “The Miracle of the Mundane” and “A Scourge of Gurus” from Heather Havrilesky’s What If This Were Enough?
Watching too much TV. The perfect second season of Fleabag. The “Juan Loves Chicken and Rice” episode of Documentary Now! Catastrophe. Derry Girls. Billions. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Sex Education. What We Do in the Shadows. Letterkenny. The Righteous Gemstones. Schitt’s Creek. The Crown. Tuca & Bertie. Barry. Rick and Morty.
Adopting a mantra for travel and creative work: “Who cares if I get anywhere?” Accepting that the toughest route is often the best route, that utopia is not a destination, it’s a direction, and that if you’re facing the wrong way, you can always turn around.
These words from Naguib Mahfouz: “Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.