Austin Kleon

Trimming the Wick

John Wick ran 101 minutes.

John Wick 2 ran 122 minutes.

John Wick 3 ran 131 minutes.

I am no film critic, but here is advice to the filmmakers for John Wick 4, which I will undoubtedly see, stolen from a website about candles:

Trimming the Wick will keep the candle burning without any black soot and it will give your candle a longer burn time. Here is what happens when you do not trim the Wick properly: When a Wick gets too long it cannot draw wax all the way up to the top of the wick. Therefore, the Wick itself will start to burn.

(I looked, and Destination Wedding ran only 86 minutes.)

Going to church with Chase Jarvis

Chase Jarvis is one of my very favorite people to talk to, so I was thrilled that he agreed to interview me on the Seattle stop of the Keep Going tour. Here’s the video of our conversation:

The setting was a little different than what we’re both used to: We spoke in the University Temple United Methodist Church, across the street from the University Book Store.

Here’s a photo of the EXIT signs I mention during the talk:

I grew up in a Methodist church, so it brought back all sorts of feelings for me. Singing in the choir. Half-listening to sermons while reading the Bible. Lighting candles on the altar. Meeting my best friend while plonking on an old piano in Sunday school.

I think the setting gave this conversation a different tone than our others. Maybe more pensive. I don’t know.

Here’s our first conversation, from 2013:

Here’s us in 2014, riding around in the back of a car at SXSW:

And here’s our third conversation, from 2016:

Chase always makes it fun. My many thanks to him, his team, the University Book Store, and the great audience who turned out.

A free education that goes on for a lifetime


Here’s Christopher Hitchens:

The great thing about writing a book is that it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already. It’s this dialectical process that makes me glad I chose the profession I did: a free education that goes on for a lifetime.

(Quoted in the “Teach What You Know” chapter of Show Your Work!)

Off the road and back at it

The cruel irony of book tour is that I go around talking about creativity when I myself am at my least creative. Tour leaves me underslept and exhausted, bereft of any kind of reliable routine or workspace, barely able to concentrate on a book… pretty much the opposite condition of the one I need to be in to sustain any kind of decent work.

Here’s musician Brian Eno on why he quit touring:

I noticed that touring — which is wonderful in some ways — is absolutely confining in other ways.  It’s so difficult… you just can’t think about anything else. You try your hardest: You take books with you and word processors, and you’re definitely going to do something with the time. And you never do. It’s so easy for it to become your exclusive life, this one and a half hours every evening that you play. And I just thought, “I’m losing touch with what I really like doing.” What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it. I never imagined a pop star life that would’ve permitted that.

How wonderful it is, now, to be off the road, and back home, not just isolated in my bliss station, but surrounded by my favorite artists, my boys, six and four, who are churning out all sorts of wild work all day.

(Above: Owen photoshopping an album cover. Below: Jules’ comic of the Three Little Pigs.)

It changes what you see

With all the lofty nonsense that gets spoken about art, it’s so easy to forget its simplest purpose: To change the way we see.

So, you watch an Andy Goldsworthy documentary, and pretty soon you’re finding beauty in the cracks in the sidewalk. (Above.)

Or, you see the stone mosaics of your friend John T. Unger and, once again, you find beauty on the sidewalk. (Below.)

Or, you remember Rauschenberg when you spot a tire track in the street. (Below.)

Claes Oldenberg said he was for art that helped old ladies across the street. I’m for art that helps them look down and notice stuff while they’re crossing!

The end of the tour

Here I am enjoying a celebratory Butterfinger Blizzard at a Dairy Queen in Iowa City.

Hours before, a tornado touched down outside of town, delaying our talk by 10 minutes while folks temporarily retreated to the basement of Prairie Lights.

I had wondered if the end of the tour would be anticlimactic. It was not.

All I wished for at the beginning was to stay healthy and safe and not have any total duds.

My wish was granted.

Thanks to everyone who came out and made it happen. (And thanks to Matt Thomas for taking this picture.)

Who cares if I get anywhere?

The cure for travel anxiety is me saying to myself, “Oh, who cares if I get anywhere?”

Come to think of it, this is also a cure for anxiety when working: “Who cares if I get anywhere?”

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