Austin Kleon

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100 things that made my year (2016)

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  1. Mozart’s clarinet quintet in A major.
  2. Taking a walk every morning because demons hate fresh air.
  3. Discovering and researching unschooling. Roberto Greco’s fantastic Tumblr and Pinboard archives. The work of John Holt, his books How Children Learn and How Children Fail, his 55-year-old journal entry, his thoughts on the true meaning of intelligence and how babies are scientists. John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching As A Subversive Activity. Lori Pickert’s twitter. DH Lawrence on how to educate a child: “Leave him alone.” Manifesto of the idle parent.
  4. Mulatu Astatke, Ethiopiques, Vol. 4.
  5. Moving into a new (old) house in the suburbs. Watching the rain from the front porch. Magic in the back yard. Fixing the 40-year-old whole house radio. Taking instruction from our old ovens. Playing hide and seek in the yard. Drawing in chalk on the driveway. Lying in a hammock in the back yard. Looking out the window while doing the dishes.
  6. Still working in a garage, but an insulated, fully A/C-ed one. Looking through my notebooks. Setting up a bliss station.
  7. Doing my part to destroy that dumb cliché, “The enemy of art is the pram in the hall.” Trying to copy how my 3-year-old son makes art in the studio. His lettering. The way he copies signs. His art. Making masks out of Trader Joe’s bags. Collaborating. Baudelaire’s quote, “Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recaptured at will.”  Toddler color theory. Do A Dot Art Markers. Crayola Slick Stix. Mid-century photos of children making art at the MoMA.  Paul Klee’s handmade puppets for his son. Darwin’s children doodling on the back of his manuscripts.  A fifth-grader’s cure for writer’s block.
  8. Practicing piano. Satie. “My Favorite Things.” Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones.” Vince Guaraldi’s “Skating.” Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debbie.” My son finishing the high E in “Fur Elise.” Pulling up Shazam, playing nonsense on the piano, and seeing what it matches. “Pianovision,” Chilly Gonzales’ word for videos of piano players shot from above.
  9. Filling the house with music. My oldest son requesting the 5th symphony on our walks. (Later, my youngest son singing it. “Duh duh duh duuuuh.”) Drawing musical scores. Reciting the narration from Benjamin Britten’s “A Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra” by heart. Singing all 9 minutes of Van Morrison’s live version of “Caravan.”
  10. Plain ol’ family life. Doing obsessive dad things like inflating the tires and breaking down boxes for the recycling. Sending my son out to get the Sunday paper. How old toys that disappear for a month become new toys. My wife comparing parenting to being a green screen puppeteer. Coming up with dumb parenting lines like, “Dad is one letter away from dead” and “You can’t spell family without FML.” Complexity. Nailing down what we expect.
  11. Michael Chabon on taking his son Abe to fashion week in Paris.
  12. Hearing Delta 5’s “You” on the radio and discovering that every time I play it my youngest son squeals with delight and starts dancing. (The way he stomps to Caspar Babypants’ “Stompy The Bear”!)
  13. Small victories. Sleeping through the night. Eating dinner. Not hitting your brother. Pooping on the toilet. Indoor voices. Learning to whisper.
  14. Silence.
  15. How Ed Emberley clears his mind.
  16. One-star Amazon reviews.
  17. Photos of people reading my books and my art in the wild. Seeing blackout poems in the classroom. (So many!)
  18. Finding these huge decades-long books of Peanuts daily strips at Costco and reading them at breakfast. This website on the the use of Beethoven in Peanuts strips.
  19. Schumann’s “Ghost Variations.”
  20. The martian landscape of Odessa from a plane.
  21. Strawberry rhubarb pie.
  22. Watching Road Runner cartoons with my sons and then seeing real roadrunners out on our walks. Suburban Texas wildlife. Cicada shells everywhere. Squirrels judging me. Deer looking at me like I’m an asshole. The Texas Mountain Laurel blooming in March. Junebugs kamikaze-ing into the windows. Fireflies! The neighborhood guy with huge parrots and a COME AND TAKE IT flag. My son literally having ants in his pants. Biggie Smalls on why he wouldn’t move to the suburbs.
  23. Rooting for escaped animal stories.
  24. Getting a projector, making an A/V cart, and watching movies huge on our bedroom wall. Awesome old movies, like Ball Of Fire, Laura, and The Palm Beach Story. New-to-us stuff. What We Do In The Shadows. Chef. Ex Machina. Enough Said. Iris. Love & Mercy. Weiner. Spotlight. The Big Short. Vernon, Florida. Old favorites, even better than we remembered. Chinatown. Stop Making Sense. Grosse Point Blank. 
  25. Seeing movies at the Alamo Drafthouse, solo, or with a friend. Hell or High Water.
  26. @NitrateDiva on Twitter.
  27. Finally taking the Black Friday bait and getting the Seinfeld box set.
  28. Reading comics when nothing else feels right. Chester Brown, Mary Wept Over The Feet Of Jesus. Daniel Clowes, Patience.
  29. Finding books that my kids love that I love to read, too. Jon Klassen’s Hat Trilogy. Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad.
  30. When my wife says, incredulously, “You’ve never seen [X]?” and then watching X and loving it. (This year: You’ve Got Mail.)
  31. Beethoven’s late string quartets and sick burns.
  32. Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists.
  33. Taking things apart to see how they work. Showing my son the piano’s guts.
  34. Walking the riverwalk from the San Antonio public library to the art museum and all the way up to the zoo.
  35. The Bill Murray method of drinking champagne.
  36. Chance operations. Throwing dice. Turning the dictionary to random pages. John Cage, Silence. Tossing coins and consulting the I Ching. Getting a Rider tarot deck and pulling cards. Jessa Crispin’s The Creative Tarot and her tarot newsletter.
  37. Collecting envelopes with security patterns.
  38. Reminding Siri to take revenge on my sons in 30 years.
  39. Standing in the Costco produce fridge in August.
  40. Accepting that creativity has seasons. How somebody asked Marcel Duchamp what he was working on and he said “just breathing.” George Carlin on taking time to figure out what’s next. Figuring out what I’m really working on.
  41. Robert Irwin’s hat: “High mileage, low maintenance.”
  42. The brief return of @JennyHolzerMom.
  43. Stress relief. Getting overwhelmed and watching a live-stream of the “bear cam” in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Replacing the doorknobs in my old house, one at a time, as needed, whenever I was losing it.
  44. Long-neck ’ritas.
  45. Calvin Trillin’s question, “Did you clean your plate?” The chicken-fried steak at Jim’s Restaurant on 71. The sides and fried chicken from the Golden Chick next door. No line at Rudy’s BBQ. Chinese delivery.
  46. Desire lines.
  47. Saying “it wasn’t for me” and moving on.
  48. Discovering the work of William Steig, especially his book, Shrek.
  49. A terrific story about typewriters.
  50. Wasting time, even though you know there’s not a lot of it. Joe Brainard’s “People Of The World: Relax!” World of Tomorrow: “Do not lose time on daily trivialities.” Hagakure: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Jim Harrison: “‘The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
  51. Putting on an art show at Mule Design in San Francisco. Lunch at House of Nanking. Staying at Wendy and Caroline’s place, warming up by the firebowl. Walking around Potrero Hill. Talking to a fellow dad from Texas in Christopher’s Books. Lunch by the ocean with Ted. Lying on a couch in Wendy’s studio overlooking the bay, reading David Hockney’s Cameraworks.
  52. The word “nitwit.”
  53. Reading about con artists. Steering clear of the exact recipe for remaining a horrible person forever. Finding lessons about dealing with Nazis in books as different as Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes and Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Cafe.
  54. Turning to poems. Maggie Smith, “Good Bones.” Philip Larkin, “The Mower.” Allen Ginsberg’s “America.” Emily Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.”
  55. The work of Ursula Franklin. The Real World of Technology. The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as A Map. Her idea of society as a potluck supper—we all bring our best dish.
  56. Garry Shandling saying, before he died, that America needs to hit rock bottom. Morris Berman’s bleak trilogy about the crumbling of the American empire: The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed. The future politician at the playground shouting “This is my territory!” but it sounded like “This is my terror tree!”
  57. Taylor Swift summing it all up: “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of.”
  58. Turning your eyes into a sewage treatment plant. Finding inspiration in mundane retail spaces. Pee-Wee Herman on his favorite Walgreens. Andrew Bird on finding inspiration in Costco. Zan McQuade on how to learn to love the mall. Fast food joints as third spaces.
  59. Good albums. Finally getting that Frank Ocean record. Solange’s A Seat At The Table. Lambchop, FLOTUS. Frank Sinatra, In The Wee Small Hours. Brian Eno, Before and After Science. Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker.  Chance The Rapper’s Coloring Book on a flight to Chicago.
  60. The Ohio Players.
  61. Ali Wong: “I don’t want to lean in, I want to lie down.”
  62. Chappell Ellison’s weekly twitter roundups, her Cartoon GIFs twitter, and epic thread of her favorite Vine videos.
  63. Being completely sucked into the voice of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. Her interview with the president.
  64. Good TV. Atlanta. The Americans. Mozart in the Jungle. Fleabag. Silicon Valley. Soundbreaking. Fargo. Catastrophe. Better Call Saul. OJ Simpson: Made in America. The Night Manager. Chef’s Table France. The Great British Baking Show.
  65. The Longform podcast.
  66. Moonlight. Getting out of bed to take a leak and seeing the moon out the bathroom window. The moon through binoculars. Can, “Moonshake.” Looking up at the stars as often as possible. Watching meteor showers in the courtyard. Looking for the moon, and my son saying, “The moon isn’t awake yet.” My son seeing the supermoon and saying, “Papa, the moon looks like the sun is shining!”
  67. All the other beautiful, grumpy, wacky things my son said. The musical threats. “I’m gonna put a bow on you and string you like a violin.” “I am going to beat you like a percussion instrument.” The insults. “You got a big ole butt!” The exclamations. “Electricity is coming out of my penis!” “I used that rock as a toilet!” The complaints. “I can’t walk. I’m out of walking steps.” “I don’t like sunscreen. I don’t like anything.” “I want to fight this drawing.” “We’re not going anywhere today all the places are closed.” “No tub time! I’m working on my book.” “Get out of here! Leave me alone! No talking during the symphony!” “I want to go back in the house. My music is killing me.” The observations. “The toilet in the lunch store was not so loud.” “This place smells delicious!” “I don’t like the grocery, but I like Papa’s studio.” “Mama, I have an idea in my head!” “Harmonicas are in the woodwind section, papa.” “Thunder sounds like kettle drums.” Seeing his first remote-controlled car: “You move it without your hands!” Seeing an old movie: “The pictures are black and white and silver—not colored in.” Training him to say, when he sees an ad on TV, “They’re trying to sell us something.” The time he said, “I want to disappear!” and my wife said, “Join the club!” The time I played him “777-9311” and he said, “Is this jazz music?” The time I asked him if he thought Beethoven drove a pickup truck, and he said, “No, he just played the piano.” The time I asked him if he wanted to go to the fire station and the candy store and the bookstore and he said, “No, papa, there is work to do.” The time I asked him if he had a good morning and he said, “The morning is still going.”
    The way he, a native Texan, says words like “hair” with two syllables. The questions. “What music is mama going to listen to on her way to the grocery?” “How did you make this lovely dinner?” “Can you tell me what I want?”
  68. The meatloaf dinner at 24 Diner.
  69. Hong Kong french toast.
  70. Avoiding human vantablack.
  71. Recording on my old Tascam 424 four-track cassette recorder.
  72. Carving pumpkins.
  73. Shrimp and grits.
  74. Walking through the airport with Miles Davis’s “Solea” on my headphones and feeling like the baddest ass alive.
  75. The soundtrack of Stranger Things. Discovering the Austin synth scene. Visiting the store Switched On. SURVIVE. Xander Harris.
  76. Fred Rogers on why you’ve already won in this world.
  77. Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers.
  78. Cartoonist Liana Finck’s instagram.
  79. Mourning Prince with these amazing mixes of deep cuts. Mourning Bowie with all the guest DJ sets, like Iggy Pop’s.
  80. Great songs, old and new. Leonard Cohen’s “Is This What You Wanted?” Wilco, “Impossible Germany.” Grimes, “Realti (Demo).” That vaporwave classic. Sonny & The Sunsets’ “Green Blood.” Jackie Shane’s monologue at the end of “Any Other Way.” Otis Clay, “Trying To Live My Life Without You.”
  81. Peanut butter shake season at P. Terry’s.
  82. Good pre-dream reading. Grimm’s Fairy tales. Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter. Joy Williams, Ninety-Five Stories of God.
  83. Seeing the Leap Before You Look show about Black Mountain College at the Wexner. Reading the beautiful catalog. Seeing the Pond Farm exhibit at SFO.
  84. Finding out the delightful link between two of my favorite books: Studs Terkel’s classic Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do was conceived when his editor read Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? and thought there needed to be a version for adults.
  85. Watching the World Series with my Cleveland-born wife.
  86. Meeting people for lunch.
  87. Losing the afternoon to a long phone conversation.
  88. Going out once in a while. Beers with old friends in Cleveland. Third row seats at Elvis Costello at the Moody Theater. Mark Mothersbaugh at the Contemporary Austin.
  89. Talking to strangers. Discussing the Ramones with a panhandler.
  90. Interviewing Box Brown at Bookpeople. Interviewing a bunch of great illustrators at the Texas Book Festival. Another interview with Chase Jarvis.
  91. Dismissing the knuckleheads in the Oasis: Supersonic documentary and then listening to What’s The Story, Morning Glory? for 3 days straight.
  92. The difference between libraries and schools. Visiting the main branch of the Richland Library in Columbia, SC, their amazing children’s room, their new Steal-inspired maker spaces, and revisiting my time as a librarian when speaking at their staff day. Identifying the public library as the American institution I most want to protect and support.
  93. Scanning my library card barcode and putting it into a Dropbox folder so I’m never without it at the self-checkout machine.
  94. Sound on Sound Fest weekend. Eating at Curra’s with The Dead Milkmen. Eating so much BBQ with my friend Christy that I popped a button on my jeans and had to go next door to the Elgin Wal-Mart and buy a belt. Visiting my first Buc-ees’.
  95. My first-come-first-serve barbershop putting up a whiteboard so you can sign in and not worry about who got there before you or after you.
  96. Re-learning cursive.
  97. Long emails from retired English professsors.
  98. Christmas Eve feast of the seven fishes.
  99. Staying married for 10 years.
  100. Books.

My reading year, 2016

10 books I loved this year, in no particular order:

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Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

I loved this novel, which runs on the voice of the main character, an old preacher named John Ames, who is writing a letter to his seven-year-old son about his life and struggles with his faith. Beautiful book.

 

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Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology

A series of radio lectures given in 1989, and yet, 100% relevant to today, as we face the rise of techno-fascism. A book and a thinker I wish more people knew about.


tumblr_o5uhe2lki31r13mfoo1_400Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

A terrific hybrid of memoir and art writing — I particularly loved the sections on David Wojnarowicz and the AIDS crisis.

 

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Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

A fascinating history that includes everything from Nazis to Tesla to Rain Man. A ton here relevant to education and parenting kids who think differently.

 

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John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

Some people question how much of this travelogue is true, but who the hell really cares when the writing is so delicious? Steinbeck himself wrote about the impossibility of capturing a nation based on one trip.

 

tumblr_oa9tcrv31m1r13mfoo1_400Tom Hart, Rosalie Lightning

A devastating comics memoir about losing a toddler, using art to sort through your life, and the struggle of being an artist with a family in America. Amazing feat.

 

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John Holt, How Children Learn

Holt’s work, first published in 1967, had more of an impact on how I parent and how I think about education than any other book I read this year. His message is simple: children are learning animals, and the best way to teach them is to trust them and get out of their way. Still feels radical.

 

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Chris Offutt, My Father, The Pornographer

Offutt’s memoir about his upbringing and his dad’s writing career also functions as a kind of cautionary tale of working from home and making a living from your art. Really great writing.

 

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Jon Klassen, The Hat Trilogy

It’s tough to hit that sweet spot in the venn diagram of books kids love that adults love to read, and it’s just as to tough to wrap up a beloved trilogy. I spent a lot of bedtimes reading these books.

 

tumblr_oijiyr3uly1r13mfoo1_400Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God

A weird, wonderful batch of super-short stories. Perfect pre-dream reading.

 

Here are 15 more books I liked, all of which could’ve easily made my top 10:

Browse my notes on all the books I read this year, my tips for reading more, and a decade’s worth of my previous reading years.

Find a new city

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There’s a very romantic American story that I love, that lots of artists who are young and starting out love, too, and it goes like this: Move to the Big City with nothing, make friends, make art, struggle, but make it. That’s the kind of story told in Patti Smith’s wonderful memoir, Just Kids.

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The trouble with this story is that people remember the place (New York) but they don’t remember the conditions. Here’s Patti Smith herself on NYC nowadays:

It certainly isn’t the place I knew when I was young?—?we had no money, the city was bankrupt, it was filled with cockroaches, a lot of rats, it was a bit gritty, and it was cheap to live here, really cheap. You could have a bookstore job and a little apartment in the East Village. There were so many of us, so many like minds. You can’t do that now.

(Emphasis mine.) She continues:

I can’t speak for new generations because they probably have their way of negotiating all of this, but I can just say it doesn’t welcome people that have very little, that just want to get a little job and have a little practice place to play with their band. I mean, all of my band left New York because they couldn’t afford to live there. We lost our practice place. I lost my art studio because all of our spaces were taken by entrepreneurs with a lot of money. But it’s still a wonderful city, a great city, it’s just, I guess, if you’re scrappy you have to find a new way to get around in it.

In another talk, Smith suggested that young artists might be better off finding a new city:

New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there’s always other cities. I don’t know?—?Detroit, Poughkeepsie, Newark. You have to find the new place because New York City has been taken away from you. It’s still a great city, but it has closed itself off from the poor and creative burgeoning society. So my advice is: Find a new city.

This is pretty much what I was trying to say a few days ago, when I posted a series of Tweets that I thought were fairly uncontroversial, not to mention unoriginal:

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No, it’s not necessarily the most glamorous option. (I’m remembering a line from Anne Trubek’s piece about living a low-overhead in the Rust Belt: “I imagine that many would rather be in debt than live in Northeast Ohio.”)

People, many of them strangers thanks to retweets, had a range of responses, some saying ridiculous things like, “You live in Austin asshole you’re just old and broke and bitter and worried about young people taking your job” (???) to thoughtful, important replies like, “I’m trans, so I need to live somewhere progressive so I feel safe day-to-day and don’t feel like I’m going to get beat up for using the wrong restroom.”

I realize now when I said “young folks” I meant young artists and poets and other creative people who were like me about ten years ago: poor, or not wealthy, trying to figure out where to live, and wanting to do something weird and interesting that doesn’t necessarily fit into a traditional model. Not: get a job at a tech company, get big art world gallery shows, etc.

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There’s lots of talk about how the internet is making it possible to live anywhere these days and do their own thing. But I think people my age and younger forget the fact that people made their own scenes even BEFORE the internet. That’s why I love books like Our Band Could Be Your Life, which show how people got together, did their own thing, and built their own networks and businesses, all with not much more than a Kinko’s, a telephone, and the US postal service.

The idea is that you live somewhere cheap, keep your overhead low, make whatever work you want to make, create your own scene. Nobody gets super-rich or super-famous, but dammit, they get to live their lives their own way, unbeholden to anybody.

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That, to me, is one of the most inspiring American storylines. It’s not for everybody, and there are plenty of arguments against it, but I think it’s the one that’s the most realistically within reach for a lot of us.

The Bliss Station

my bliss station

It’s felt impossible lately not to be distracted and despondent. I’m trying to spend as much time at my bliss station as I can.

What’s a bliss station? Here’s Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth:

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

My wife pointed out to me that Campbell says you must have a room OR a certain hour — whether Campbell really meant this or not, she suggested that maybe it’s possible that a bliss station can be not just a where, but a when. Not just a sacred space, but also a sacred time.

The deluxe package would be having both a special room and a special hour that you go to it, but we started wondering whether one would make up for not having the other.

For example, say you have a tiny apartment that you share with small children. There’s no room for your bliss station, there’s only time: When the kids are asleep or at school or day care, even a kitchen table can be turned into a bliss station.

Or, say your schedule is totally unpredictable, and a certain time of day can’t be relied upon — that’s when a dedicated space that’s ready for you at any time will come in handy.

What’s clear is that it’s healthiest if we make a daily appointment to disconnect from the world so that we can connect with ourselves.

“Choose the time that’s good for you,” says Francis Ford Coppola. “For me, it’s early morning because I wake up, and I’m fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one’s gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”

The easiest way I get my feelings hurt by turning on my phone first thing in the morning. And even on the rare occasion I don’t get my feelings hurt, my time is gone and my brains are scrambled.

“Do not start your day with addictive time vampires such as The New York Times, email, Twitter,” says Edward Tufte. “All scatter eye and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short term memory.”

Every morning I try to fight the urge, but every morning my addiction compels me.

“The new heroin addiction is connectivity,” says V. Vale. “The only solution is not one that most people want to face, which is to become lovers of solitude and silence… I love to spend time alone in my room, and in my ideal world the first hour of every day would be in bed, writing down thoughts, harvesting dreams, before anyone phones or you have any internet access.”

Kids, jobs, sleep, and a thousand other things will get in the way, but we have to find our own sacred space, our own sacred time.

“Where is your bliss station?” Campbell asked. “You have to try to find it.”

* * *

This post became a part of my book, Keep Going.

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