It’s my least favorite season in what’s shaping up to be one of my least favorite years. (Is it half empty or half full?) I’m trying to take it easy. Sitting around drinking coffee and reading books and scribbling notes to myself. Not feeling much like blogging. Might be quiet around here for a bit. (I’ll still be sending out the newsletter.)
“I’m a professional dilettante,” Jim Jarmusch says. “It’s my job is to gather and absorb things that interest me.”
Jarmusch talks a lot about “Strummer’s Law,” four simple words he learned from his friend Joe Strummer (who he directed in Mystery Train): “No input, no output.”
Meaning, we’re going to hear a band, we’re going to go to a museum, or we’re going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We’re going to get some input, because if we don’t, then we have nothing. It’s a circle. It’s a respiratory thing.
And:
When I studied with Nicholas Ray he was always telling us, “If you want to make films, watch a lot of films, but don’t just watch films, go take a walk, look at the sky, read a book about meteorology, look at the design of people’s shoes.
Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like his quote in Steal Like An Artist:
See also: Brian Eno on “import and export,” “Input and output,” and “Problems of input are problems of output”
Designer Scott Boms recently donated designer Quentin Fiore’s hand-annotated mechanical (in publishing, a mechanical is like a prototype for the book) of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage to Letterform Archive in San Francisco and let us all have a look:
I acquired this after the passing of Marshall’s wife Corinne as we were cleaning out the McLuhan home in Wychwood Park in Toronto. It was stuffed in a cardboard box in the basement and long forgotten…. The story goes that Marshall made barely any edits to Fiore and Agel‘a proposal, including the typo in the name of the book itself, though there are a handful of written annotations through this mechanical.
Designer Kelli Anderson posted a video on her Instagram stories of Boms flipping through:
Kelli added a bit more background to the famous story about the title (from the McLuhan estate’s website):
“Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover ‘Massage’. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!’ Thus, there are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.”
(As the Oblique Strategies tell us: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”)
Then again, here’s Quentin Fiore being interviewed by Steven Heller in 1988 (from this supplement to The Electronic Information Age Book):
SH Where did the title come from?
QF From McLuhan. What McLuhan intended by “massage” is that technology takes over us completely. To some people this seemed demeaning: to think that a piece of junk like a television or computer can change their lives. I mean, they couldn’t understand how man fashioned the shovel, and then the shovel proceeded to fashion man. Many people can’t stomach this.
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.
—John Baldessari
When I talk to artists who are “stuck” I often think they should be prescribed a session with some four-year-olds. (Borrow a kid!) Four-year-olds are the most “unstuck” creatures around. To watch a four-year-old draw is to watch some kind of magic happen, magic that, even in two or three years, will not come naturally, but will need to be conjured, somehow.
Lynda Barry does this at the University of Wisconsin:
“When I came to the university… one thing that struck me was how miserable the grad students were. I thought, I wonder if I could pair them up with four-year-olds?” She started a program called Draw Bridge that did just that. “What I hoped would happen was my students would learn to borrow the kids’ state of mind and learn to approach problems in a way that was less tight and focused, a way that was happier and set the conditions for discovery.”
If you follow Lynda on Instagram, she often posts her collaborations with four-year-olds:
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByGER_QgzuS
Here’s one about drawing Batman:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxyh16rl1Ke/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
And here are some 4-year-olds doing a copying exercise:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxeFX6KDKEf/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
I’m lucky right now because I live with a four-year-old and I get to spend a lot of time with him, watching him draw. (Although, I’m telling you: it’s a lot easier to just borrow one and hand them back!) If you came to one of the Keep Going tour dates, you saw this slide of Jules drawing when he was three:
(I write more about his drawing in the “Your Work is Play” section of the book.)
This is my second time around living with a four-year-old. This one is a little more introverted than the first one. I did a lot more collaborating with the first. I remember transcribing some of his wild monologues:
He was basically an ecstatic poet!
I have two daughters that could both draw like Albrecht Durer when they were about seven years old, before the teachers got ahold of them.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I’m also reminded now of illustrator Mica Angela Hendricks and her collaborations with her 4-year-old daughter, which started out when her daughter saw her sketchbook and asked if she could draw, too. She eventually started draw unfinished heads at night so her daughter could finish them in the morning. “Do you have any heads for me today?” her daughter would ask.
Hanging out with his four-year-old niece led animator Don Hertzfeldt to some of the best parts of his absolutely incredible short, World of Tomorrow. Here’s how it went:
My niece, Winona, contributes the voice of little Emily. She was 4 when I recorded her. You can’t direct a 4-year-old, I learned that really fast. I couldn’t even get her to repeat lines for me. So I just recorded audio as we drew pictures together, played with stuff, talked about the world. I was pretty aware that if the recordings produced nothing, the film would have been dead before it even began. She lives in Scotland and I am in Austin, so I usually only get to see her about once a year. After a weeklong visit, recording five minutes here and there, I had about an hour or so of total recorded time with her. So the first step was finding all of her best reactions and questions, and I began to figure out what her character could be talking about here, or looking at there.
“You can’t direct a 4-year-old…” Truer words never spoken! All you can do is set them up and hit record. And hang on for the ride…
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.
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