Austin Kleon

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RECOMMENDATIONS

I don’t know what possessed me—I chronicle most of the stuff I’m reading / watching / looking at / listening to on my tumblelog and twitter and muxtape—but here’s a big bunch of stuff that I’ve dug in the past couple of months:

what it is by lynda barry

What It Is by Lynda Barry

What more can I say about this book?

It’s collage, it’s a writing textbook, it’s a memoir…it’s everything. It’s big. It’s hardcover. It’s awesome.
beach house devotion

Devotion music by Beach House

Quiet, soft, and beautiful. Lots of organ and reverb. Good hangover music.
and then there were none

And Then There Were None… by Agatha Christie

There was something magical about an island — the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world — an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.

Hmmm. A group of strangers stranded on a mysterious island, all with shady pasts that come back to haunt them…sound familiar?

My wife is an Agatha Christie nut. This was the first thing of hers I’ve ever read. 173 lightning fast pages. Fun read.
away from her

Away from Her a film by Sarah Polley

So sad, but so good. And the first time directing for Sarah Polley. She was quoted as saying the film was about

the opposite kind of love than we usually celebrate in films, which is new love without knowledge and without hardship.

It’s also a terrific example of how short stories fleshed out (as opposed to novels being compressed) make better films. (See also: In The Bedroom)

My favorite line (from the Alice Munro short story):

She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.
giant

Giant a film by George Stevens

PT Anderson was once asked to name 3 films that he loved but no one had ever heard of. He replied,

I like films that people HAVE heard of: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Giant, The Big Lebowski.

I recommend all three, too. Giant is a 3-hour epic set in West Texas. (Shot in Marfa.) James Dean. A gorgeous, young Elizabeth Taylor. What’s not to like?
knockemstiff by donald ray pollock

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

I first heard about this book last year when my parents sent me clips from their local newspapers.

This is the book I wanted to write as an undergrad: an updated Winesburg, Ohio set in the Southern part of the state. I grew up about 30 miles from the real Knockemstiff, but I never really belonged there, not the way Donald Ray Pollock belonged: he worked at the Mead paper plant in Chillicothe for 30 years before he started writing, and got his MFA at Ohio State. He knows his place and writes about it beautifully.

This is a strong first book — but it can tough to read all the dark stories (note: it’s full of sex, booze, foul language, and drug use) at once. I recommend spreading them out. Standout stories for me were “Real life” and “Discipline.”
no more heroes

No More Heroes a videogame by Suda51

This is a violent videogame for the Wii, in which you play a hipster assassin with a lightsaber. It’s basically a GTA ripoff, but the art is great, and the game is full of little side missions which really make it entertaining. A good buy for $30.
pilot g2 gel pens

PILOT G2 BOLD POINT GEL PEN

Holy crap these things are awesome. If you want to lay down a big fat line, these babies will do the trick. 1mm > .07mm.
some like it hot

Some Like It Hot A film by Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors: I especially love The Apartment, which also stars Jack Lemmon. And Marilyn Monroe is gorgeous, of course…
thoreau at walden by john porcellino

Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino

John Porcellino is definitely in my top 5 favorite cartoonists, and his simple, zen lines are perfect for adapting Thoreau into comics.
lykkeli-youthnovels

Youth Novel music by Lykke Li

I can’t really describe her music. I always play it when I’m walking to the bus…
dan in real life

Dan in Real Life a film by Peter Hedges

If Eddie Campbell says something is good, you know it’s good. This really surprised me. It’s a story about nice people who get into a genuine conflict. Probably why it didn’t get very good reviews: no explosions or incest or whatever…

Phew. That was too much work. I think I’ll save this kind of thing for the next year-end lists.

What stuff are y’all into right now?

LETTER TO A YOUNG COLLAGE ARTIST

The year was 1997. I was 13 years old. Green Day was the coolest band in the world. Two years previous, they’d just put out their album, Insomniac, with an insane-looking cover. I checked out the liner notes, and found out it was done by a collage artist named Winston Smith:

insomniac.jpg

I had a great art teacher, Robyn Helsel, who assigned us a project where we had to pick a contemporary artist and write to them. Most of the class picked their artists out of a catalog. I picked Winston. I used my dad’s e-mail account and sent probably half a dozen e-mails to a gallery curator I found online, asking for Winston’s home address. The curator finally replied: “Stop bugging me, kid. Here’s his address.” I sent Winston a two-page letter using a ransom note font in Microsoft Word, telling him about me and my band, asking him about his technique, his influences…I even had the audacity to include a sketch of an idea I had for a piece he might want to attempt. (I have the letter somewhere…but unfortunately, not the sketch!) A few months went by. As I remember it, nobody in the class heard back from their artist.

Then one day a huge, stuffed manila envelope came in the mail. I ran to the kitchen table, tore it open, and dumped out its contents. There was a 14-page hand-written note from Winston and probably 50 pages of color photocopies of his work and press clippings. I couldn’t believe it. An artist—a real artist!—had written me back!

To me, it was the equivalent of Rilke writing back to the young poet. He told me about his life and his methods. He urged me to always question authority, stay away from drugs, and keep getting straight As so one day I could pay the bills. (An artist—a real artist!—was telling me it was okay to get straight As!) I’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of things he wrote about—art, America, growing up in a small-town—it was like a time-bomb that went off in my brain.

The letter, and I’m not exaggerating, changed my life.

I wrote him back, and he wrote me back. We’ve kept up a casual correspondence since.

I was at my mom’s over the holidays, and decided to use her new scanner to
archive some papers I wanted to preserve for safe-keeping.

I’m not sure if it will interest anyone else, but I’m posting it here as a shining example of great generosity from an established artist to an aspiring artist. It’s one of my most treasured possessions, and I just really freaking love it and want to share it.

And so, with Winston’s permission, here it is. (Also: be sure to check out Winston’s work and buy some of his stuff!)

VIEW THE WHOLE LETTER AS A FLICKR SET

1

[Read more…]

ON SCHULZ AND PEANUTS BY DAVID MICHAELIS

schulz & peanuts

Schulz: All of the things that you see in the strip, if you were to read it every day and study it, you would know me.

Rose: To read your characters is to know you.

Schulz: Isn’t that depressing?

—Charles Schulz on The Charlie Rose Show

Good grief. David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts. A grueling 565 pages of book that exhausted and disappointed me. So many details, so many of them not significant. I never get sick of Peanuts, but by the end of the book, I was sick of Charles Schulz.

Jeet Heer has written a really brilliant post about the strengths and flaws of the book, almost 100% of which I agree with. Jeannie Schulz and the Schulz kids have also been really outspoken about the fact that the book, in their opinion, is just downright wrong.

Whether it’s factually inaccurate or not, I didn’t find it to be a pleasant nor a particularly great read.

The major innovation of the book is the way Michaelis weaves examples of the strips into the autobiography. This works because—as Schulz said—to read the strip is to know him. It’s all there. This book would’ve been a helluva lot better if Michaelis ran with this technique, and just collaged the strips in a way that reflected the chronological order of Schulz’s life, stating the plain autobiographical facts alongside them, leaving out his psychological “insights.” Now THAT would be a cool book.

Here are some materials I recommend instead of the Michaelis book for those interested in Schulz and his work:

goodgrief.jpg

Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz

Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography. Nobody seems to be interested in this book now that the Michaelis biography has come out, but I think it hits all the significant details and deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner. Plus, the writing is way better. Worth tracking down.

(Great Amazon customer review.)

Check out an excerpt from the book in my post, THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS.
peanuts a golden celebration

Peanuts: A Golden Celebration

Probably the best introduction to the strip: contains, for better or worse, strips from all five decades, including commentary here and there by Schulz himself. It’s a big, coffee-table size book, and about 200 or so pages. You can get it used for dirt cheap.

(Even better might be an earlier edition, Peanuts Jubilee, but I think it’s pretty hard to get a hold of…)
peanuts

Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz

Chip Kidd designed this beautiful little book. It concentrates on the early part of the strip’s life and development, and contains numerous beautiful scans of actual newspaper clippings (a lot which come from the personal collections of Kidd and Chris Ware) and photographs of Schulz’s tools.
charlierose.jpg

ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW

This is a good interview with Schulz from near the end of his life, and you can watch the whole thing for free.
conversations

Charles M. Schulz: Conversations

This is a great book which includes Gary Groth’s excellent, 100+ page interview for the Comics Journal.

A few more thoughts about the book.
graphic fiction

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories

This might seem like an odd choice, but Ivan Brunetti includes a whole slew of Peanuts tributes, including a piece penned by Schulz himself on how to be a cartoonist.
complete peanuts

THE COMPLETE PEANUTS

Finally, if you really want to know the man, just read his strips. Fantagraphics has done an amazing job with these books — I’ve been slowly building my set. (And I’m hoping, hoping, hoping, that they will chose to release it on DVD at some point, a la The New Yorker.)

If any of you dear readers read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

TUMBLR

10-20-07

This weekend I started re-thinking how I blog and why I blog and whether I should be blogging at all. Here’s a snippet from an interview with Clive Thompson (his great blog is Collision Detection) that pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Some blogs exist solely for people who just surf all day long and they’re like, “Check this out, check this out, check this out.” They’ll post 20 things a day that are all one sentence long. And they’re really cool because they’re filtering the Internet for you. If you like their aesthetic, they’ll find things that are interesting and save you the work. They’re like a little concierge of culture and information.

Now I obviously like doing that, but I got busier when I went back to work, so I didn’t have as much time to blog. And I began to realize that what interested me more was posting about something that I’d discovered and no one else had. Or posting about something that other people were blogging about, but only if I had something interesting to say about it. So I blogged less frequently and I blogged longer little essays, things that were at least 500 words and sometimes up to 1000 words. Every posting became like a mini essay. And that’s the way I still write today.

…My goal is to find something thought provoking, offer people a new way to think about it, and let them check it out themselves. I sometimes just write something that I’m thinking about—there won’t be a link to anything, but that’s rare. Or if there’s something that’s really big on the blogosphere, I’ll try to find an unusual take on it.

I found a post from February where I wrote this: “I’m trying to make this thing as much like a virtual sketchbook/scrapbook/notebook as I can, and avoid the regular trappings of blogging…” What I found out though, is that I want two blogs: 1) the virtual sketchbook/notebook I was writing about and 2) the scrapbook where I just paste random crap from the web that I come across that is cool and interesting but doesn’t deserve much commentary.

So from now on, there will be a blog and a scrapblogtumblelog. Now, I’m going to quit messing around on the internet and go draw something that’s actually worth posting.

PROCESS: MY COVER FOR HAWKLINE’S UPCOMING EP, “SHIPWRECK”

front cover

back cover

I usually don’t talk much about my individual process here, mostly because I’m not sure who’d be interested, but today I thought I’d break with precedent and take you step-by-step through a recent project I did for my buddies in the band Hawkline.

Long story short, they saw my work on Calamity, said they were putting out an album called “Shipwreck,” and that my stuff might be a good match. So I said, “Cool. Let’s do it.”

I tend to look at everything through the medium of collage: all we’re really doing with art is taking things that we’ve seen and making something we can call our own. Borrowing. Stealing. Mixing. We take the words we know and put them into sentences. We take the notes we know and put them into melodies. We take the experiences we have and shape them into stories.

Etc.

I’d say that 90 percent of my process is fumbling around in a sketchbook, 10 percent is execution. In this case, they caught me in a brush phase, so I came up with this concept:

sketchbook

What did Picasso say? “Good artists borrow, great artists steal?” Well, I ripped that cover idea off of an old engraving I came across:

engraving

Anyways, the band liked the idea, but decided they wanted to put out an EP before the album. I thought I could do a lot better than the original design, so I started looking for inspiration. I remembered R. Crumb’s cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills:

Robert Crumb, "CHeap Thrills" album cover

Funny story about that cover: originally it was supposed to be the back cover for the album, but Janis liked it so much she had it put on the front. But anyways, I liked the way the artwork was splintered into comic panels, so I said, “Okay, sure — I’ll rip that off with woodcuts.” I began doodling on post-its for a layout:

layout

At this point, I thought I had a good idea of where the cover was going, so before making a bunch of artwork, I decided to finish their logo first. A couple of months back I had already doodled some logos while staying at Corey’s house. Hawkline’s sound is pretty muscular, so I wanted something stark and simple. (Something that would look good on a sticker or a tattoo.)

There just happened to be a Ketel One Vodka ad staring up at me from the back cover of a Rolling Stone:

846_1.jpg

Now, the font that Ketel uses is just a font called Bradley, that all kinds of places use:

2887_2_1.big

So I ripped that off:

sketchbook font

And came up with a final version. Keep in mind, I’m hand-lettering this:

hawkline logo

I liked that a lot, so I thought I’d just do the title of the EP in the same font as a kind of anchor for the cover. I also played around with layouts, drawing a bazillion thumbnails:

thumbnails

Now that I had the layout pretty much figured out, I concentrated on the final artwork. I found these cool woodcuts by an artist named Kim Atkinson:

Woodcut by Kim Atkinson

Woodcut by Kim Atkinson

With those as inspiration, I finished the front cover:

front cover

Now to the back. The band members said they’d be interested in having me cartoon them, so I had them send me some mugshots:

hawkline reference

Which I used to doodle caricatures:

caricatures

I thought the idea of a band playing in a lifeboat was a fun one, so I used that and hand-lettered the information they wanted listed for the back cover:

back cover

I have to admit, I almost like the back cover more than the front. Since the cover and the back were so busy, I thought a simple CD design was the way to go:

cd design

So there you have it. Hope that wasn’t too terribly boring. Check out Hawkline. The guys have my favorite song, “Stop Your Cryin’,” [MP3] streaming on on their myspace.

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