Austin Kleon – Page 497

MUSICOPHILIA BY OLIVER SACKS

Monday, February 11, 2008

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

ON THE ROAD WITH THE BEATS AT THE RANSOM CENTER

Friday, February 8, 2008

on the road with the beats

There’s a fantastic exhibit that just opened up at the Harry Ransom Center called “On the Road With The Beats,” showcasing the center’s wonderful collection of Beat Generation materials. They have letters from Allen Ginsberg, old Zines by William Burroughs, great prints by Kenneth Patchen, and best of all, a digital display where you can page through Kerouac’s original notebook for On The Road.

On Tuesday we went to the opening and got a 1 1/2 hour tour by the show’s curator, Molly Schwartzburg:

on the road with the beats tour

Here’s Molly on the organization of the show:

“From the first stages of preparing this exhibition, it was clear that place, travel and motion were a natural way to frame the Ransom Center’s Beat holdings….In their lives, art and their love for jazz, the Beats wanted to improvise, to leap into the unknown, the unscripted, the unconventional—and one of the most important ways they did this was through their legendary travels across the country and the oceans.

She’s interested in works that blend together art and the written word, so there was a lot of visual material—so much to look at that I went back on Thursday and I’ll probably have to go back next Thursday. Then I’ll have to go back in early March to see the first 48 feet of Kerouac’s original On The Road scroll.

Here are some of my notes:

And here’s a great quote I read by Kenneth Patchen:

“it happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing. In other words, I don’t consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend. It gives an extra dimension to the medium of words.”

On Thursday, I was copying some lettering from a Kenneth Patchen print, and this girl was talking really loud on her cell phone. I gave her a dirty look, and she said, “Sorry!” but then proceeded to continue her conversation. Finally, she came up to me and we enacted the scene in the sketch below:

Whether you like the Beats or not, this is a great show, and I would encourage everyone nearby to go see it.

AT NO COST

Monday, February 4, 2008

AT NO COST

DON’T MAKE ME THINK BY STEVE KRUG

Monday, February 4, 2008

I don’t talk about web design all that much on this blog—probably because it’s what I do at work all day—but for anybody wanting to dip into the subject, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is a simple, straightforward, and classic guide to web usability. I read it when I started my job. (Almost six months ago!) I found these illustrated notes in my desk today, so I thought I’d share…

DON'T MAKE ME THINK BY STEVE KRUG

THE GIFT BY LEWIS HYDE

Sunday, February 3, 2008

There was a good article about this book in the LA Times:

Hyde’s 1983 book “The Gift,” subtitled “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,” argues that inspiration comes to its creator the same way a gift does. Because of this, both the artist and the resulting work itself become uneasy in a market economy. This gift is most comfortable, instead, when it is kept moving — offered or traded — instead of being hoarded or commodified….Over the years, “The Gift” has developed a cult following among writers and artists who rarely lend their names to anything as potentially sentimental as a book on “creativity” — David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Geoff Dyer among them. To Jonathan Lethem, it’s “a life-changer”; video artist Bill Viola calls it “the best book I have read on what it means to to be an artist in today’s economic world.”

Mr. Hyde himself gives a good summary:

The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing and teaching….This book is about the alternative economy of artistic practice. For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well into a market economy, and this book explains why and builds out on the alternative, which is to imagine the commerce of art to be well described by gift exchange.

In other words, “Don’t quit your day job, dude.”

I’m not really sure what to say about this book. It just kind of re-affirmed a lot of what I’ve been thinking about making art: that it’s important for me to have a day job, so I can separate work from play, and that the more generous you are with your audience (through blogging, teaching, sharing, etc.) the better off you’ll be as an artist—spiritually and financially. Good companion reading would be Cory Doctorow’s article, “Giving It Away.”

Has anybody else read it? Thoughts?