Austin Kleon

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Never pay for wi-fi

never pay for wifi

One of my favorite discoveries this year was Nina Katchadourian’s Seat Assignment, an ongoing project she started in 2010, in which she uses long plane rides to make art using only her camera phone and materials on hand. She’ll build shelters out of snacks, she’ll make gorillas out of sweaters, she’ll go into the bathroom and dress up like old Flemish paintings. (My favorite pieces are from the “High Altitude Spirit Photography” series, where she’ll use a little sprinkled salt or the glare from an overhead reading light to spookify in-flight magazine photos.)

Seat Assignment has taken place over 100 flights. Lots of things interest me about the project, including, of course, these lines from her statement: “the artistic potential that lurks within the mundane” and “the productive tension between freedom and constraint,” both ideas that have obsessed me ever since I started making my blackout poems.

I’m especially interested in how Katchadourian refers to her camera phone — usually bemoaned as a device for distraction —as not only a kind of sketchbook, but a “camouflage.” From Curioser: “Once you pull out a real camera, it screams, ‘I’m making art!’” She doesn’t want to be observed making the work, she just wants to look like another bored traveler killing time. It works: only three passengers over the years have asked her what she’s up to.

The title, “Seat Assignment,” makes me think of my writing teacher’s advice for getting writing done: “APPLY ASS TO CHAIR.” Because you’re literally buckled into a chair, I’ve always found planes a terrific spot to do a lot of writing and reading and drawing and thinking. (Business class is like a dream scenario for the writer: you have a comfortable seat, a window to stare out of, and you’re occasionally brought water & snacks.) But, as in-flight wi-fi speeds and entertainment options keep getting better and better, the temptation to be distracted on planes becomes greater and greater. Just like on the ground, it now takes an act of will to be bored enough on a plane to actually enter that good headspace where you can make something. For now, I stick to my rules: turn off the seat-back TV and never pay for wi-fi.

PS. The comic above was one of four I drew on my iPad during a recent (coach!) flight from Austin to San Francisco. To see more like it, check my Instagram.

PPS. This post turned into chapter 2 of Keep Going.

Hold thy tongue (and loosen thy pen)

I shared this doodle from my notebook on Instagram the other day and everyone who commented seemed to assume that it was about Writing, as in, Writing Books, or getting Work done. (See a previous post of mine: “Shut up and write the book.”)

What it was really about was the old idea of having a “loose tongue,” or saying out loud the things that you should keep to yourself. In the home, in the workplace, or on the internet. (Perhaps the phrase needs an update for the smartphone age: It’s our thumbs that get us the most in trouble these days…)

We focus so much on our notebooks as traps for capturing those rare, beautiful ideas that visit us, but notebooks are also amazing cages for detaining what is inside of us that wants so desperately to escape. To write down your rawest thoughts in a notebook is like putting a wild, unknown beast into a holding cell for further observation. Here, you can safely discover what the beast is and figure out what to do with it. Sometimes the beast needs indefinite incarceration, sometimes it needs rehabilitation, sometimes it’s ready for release into the wild, and sometimes it just needs to be put down. But to let it escape at whim is rarely a good idea.

Or, as I’ve said before, a notebook is a good place to have bad ideas.

There’s an old Quaker saying: “Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.”

Sometimes we need to see the words before we know if they can improve the silence.

Hold thy tongue. Loosen thy pen.

The benefits of boredom

having become bored out of her gourd the artist started working

Leslie Barker, a writer at the Dallas Morning News, got in touch with me way back in October and asked me about a subject I consider myself an expert on: the benefits of boredom.

Here’s what I wrote in Steal Like An Artist:

the benefits of boredom

By the way, “Stare at a spot on the wall” was something I stole from psychologist William James of all people. I later turned it into an exercise in The Steal Like An Artist Journal:

stare at this dot until you get an idea

When it comes to the benefits of boredom, I’m certainly not the first to write about the subject…

Neil Gaiman: “The best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.”

Steve Jobs: “I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.”

Peter Bregman: “Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.”

Scott Adams: “I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.”

Joseph Brodsky: “Boredom is your window… Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”

Albert Einstein: “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

The trouble is that we live in an age in which we never get ourselves the chance to be bored. All the entertainment we could ever dream of is at our fingertips, waiting on the phone in our pants pocket.

I think the time is ripe for us all to recognize boredom as the delicacy it is. Here’s a quote from Leslie’s piece, “How Boredom is becoming anything but boring”:

“I think boredom might make a comeback,” he says from his home in Austin. “I think it’s almost a luxurious thing, a decadent thing. To allow yourself to be bored is almost like a pampering thing. I can see a boredom ranch: ‘Come here and be bored!’ ”

See you at the ranch!

Update: the folks at Texas Standard read Leslie’s piece and had me in the studio to talk boredom:

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