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Rules of the studio

Thursday, September 12, 2019

The boys like to work in my studio, but they’re rascals, so we needed to set down some rules.

(Inspired by Corita Kent, Lynda Barry, Tom Sachs, Keri Smith, Seth Godin, etc.)

It’s obviously going to be an evolving list…

Keep it on The One

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Prince would get mad when people called his music magical: “Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules.”

Here’s Bootsy Collins laying down the #1 rule of funk: Keep it on the one.

“It’s however you feel, you just gotta fit it in that little space that you’ve got…. Once you got it, you can do anything you want to do with it! Just keep it on THE ONE!”

(Lynda Barry shows this video to her comics classes.)

Collins learned about The One from his former bandleader James Brown. Collins thought he was “killin’ ’em” with all his wild playing, but Brown set him straight:

“Son, give me the one. You give me the one, you can do all those other things.” So, I started to understand: If I give you the one, I can do all these other crazy things.” James Brown was the one that told me: “Son, you need to give me the one.” […] He didn’t know the power of that. That changed my whole life. Once I learned where the one was at? It was on.”

What did James Brown himself say about The One? In the introduction to his biography, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, RJ Smith quotes him:

“The ‘One’ is derived from the Earth itself, the soil, the pine trees of my youth. And most important, it’s on the upbeat—ONE two THREE four—not the downbeat, one TWO three FOUR, that most blues are written. Hey, I know what I’m talking about! I was born to the downbeat, and I can tell you without question there is no pride in it. The upbeat is rich, the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive ‘One,’ not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat. In the end, it’s not about music—it’s about life.”

The One is both practical and mystical. It’s about artistic freedom through the constraint of form, but it’s also about something bigger.

Here’s Miles Davis at the end of his autobiography:

I have never felt this creative. I feel like the best if yet to come. Like Prince says when he’s talking about hitting the beat and getting to the music and the rhythm, I’m going to keep “getting up on the one,” brother, I’m just going to try to keep my music getting up on the one, getting up on the one every day I play. Getting up on the one. Later.

In my favorite writing book, What It Is, Lynda Barry explains how to make a “Word Bag.” A word bag is basically just a bunch of words you like that you write down and stuff in a bag and pull out randomly when you need to begin a piece of writing and you’re not sure where to start. (Here’s Lynda, taking you through the exercise.)

This is pretty much how Ray Bradbury got started, too.

INTERVIEWER

In Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton. Do you still do this?

BRADBURY

Not as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

Here’s more from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, about about how these “long lines of nouns,” these lists, helped him figure out who he was as a writer:

These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull… I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.

He encourages other writers that making “similar lists, dredged out of the lopsided of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.”

(I talk more about the magic of making lists in chapter one of Keep Going.)

Family circus at the museum

Friday, June 14, 2019

A fun Family Circus from 1972, shared by @KurtBusiek.

It reminds me of this spread from a 1963 LIFE magazine (see my post: “Borrow a kid”):

It also reminds me, with its subtle poke at modern art — and the supposed gap between “high” art in museums vs. the “low” art of the comics page — of Ad Reinhardt’s art comics collected in How To Look. (See some of them here.)

Here’s “How to Look at an Artist.”:

With comics now being accepted as their own art form, there are still those who need “high/low” distinctions of taste within it. A lot of folks — including me! — roll their eyes at Family Circus, but Lynda Barry drew a really beautiful appreciation in The Best American Comics 2008:

She says:

I loved Family Circus because I lived in a violent, difficult home. I used to look at that little circle and think, ‘Goddam! How can I get into there from where I am?

And tells this story:

I’d always heard that great art will cause people to burst into tears but the only time it ever happened to me was when I was introduced to Bil Keane’s son, Jeff. As soon as I shook his hand I just started bawling my face off because I realized I had climbed through the circle.

And how I did it was by making pictures and writing stories. To me the Family Circus has always been my wished for family. My soul family in the image world…

COMICS ARE MIRACULOUS!!! They are IMMUNE SYSTEMS! They are TRANSPORT SYSTEMS!!! They are TIME TRAVELING DEVICES!!

A four-year-old will get you unstuck

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

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…