In the Before Times, I would occasionally make a mini zine to put in my son’s sack lunch before he went to school. Here’s a zine I made for him about Miles Davis. (It’s Davis’s birthday.) I am struck often by how when you make things for others, they wind up speaking to you.
My kids got this Crazy Forts set for Christmas. We got out the instructions…
…but following them felt too much like the pain of putting together IKEA furniture, so we threw the instructions out and just started making free-form sculptures with them, admiring the shadows they cast:
Speaking of IKEA — they should get whoever does the step-by-step instructions for their Mario app to do their furniture assembly instructions:
I kind of hate branded LEGO kits, by the way. Whenever I put them together for my kids, I basically feel like a slightly-less-stressed version of me when assembling IKEA furniture. Raul Gutierrez, of Tiny Bop put it well:
The best toys — Tinkertoys, Lego, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs — allowed us to build and rebuild almost endlessly. With my kids, I noticed that these kinds of toys have become increasingly rare. Lego bricks are sold primarily as branded kits. Instead of a pile of blocks that could become anything, they are now essentially disassembled toys. Instead of starting with a child’s imagination of what could be, play is now fixed on a single endpoint, predetermined by Lego’s designers.
Because the universe has a sense of humor, the minute I copy/pasted this quote, my son Owen came in to show me this Frankensteined plane he’d made with his brother “out of scraps”:
The kids are alright.
UPDATE 1/6/2021: Jules wanted a toy owl, so I made Coconut The Owl one out of one of his LEGO Super Mario kits:
“Art alone deterred me. How could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?”
—Ludwig van Beethoven
Today is Beethoven’s 250th birthday! Well, nobody knows for sure what day he was actually born, but he was baptized on Dec. 17th, so Dec. 16th is generally accepted as the day we celebrate him. (Check out all the Peanuts strips about Beethoven’s birthday on this wonderful site about Charles Schulz’s use of classical music. I would love to turn this into a book.)
Classical music can be hard to get into for a lot of people. One thing that has helped me is to read stories about the composers and what they got up to. (Composer Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirits is a great starting point.)
Beethoven is ridiculously fun to read about. He’s one of those musical artists who is so ubiquitous and popular that I never really got around to studying him, but once I did, holy moly, he became one of my favorites. Not because his tumultuous life is something to emulate. He was abused as a child and was notoriously difficult and ugly and sometimes abusive in his personal life. (The last musical notes Beethoven ever wrote were next to the words, “We all err, but each one errs differently.”) Like Bach, who also had a rough childhood, the fact that he was able to make such beautiful music out of such emotional chaos is remarkable.
The problem with Beethoven biographies are that some of them are absolutely massive. (Swafford’s acclaimed bio is over a thousand pages.) Years ago, I picked up John Suchet’s 300-page Beethoven: A Man Revealed, and it felt more than enough to whet my appetite. (The excerpts below are all Suchet.)
The rest of this post is some of my favorite Beethoven stories:
The funny thing about Beethoven is that many of the myths you’ve heard are actually true.
First off, it’s true that he was mostly deaf when he wrote his most glorious music, including the 9th symphony and the late quartets, which is totally freaking mindblowing to me.
Another thing people overlook when they get hung up on the deaf-guy-writing-music thing; they see the music through an abled lens, in which the deafness is something that Beethoven overcame, not something in which the deafness actually led to unique creative decisions!
— ? sharon su is on bluesky ? (@doodlyroses) December 17, 2019
He was so deaf he carried a notebook around and had people write their questions in it so he could have conversations:
…his deafness led him to carry a notebook, so-called “conversation books,” for people to write down their questions. His nephew Karl wrote in one of these, “You knew Mozart, where did you see him?” And in other conversation book a few years later, “Was Mozart a good pianoforte player?” It [the instrument] was then still in its infancy.”
Of course the utterly maddening, infuriating, frustrating fact is that Beethoven spoke rather than wrote his answer, so we have no idea of what he said.
It’s also true that Beethoven was sort of a slob and he looked totally crazy at times, waving his arms, composing in his head, and shouting to be heard.
In fact, he once got arrested by the police when he got lost in the suburbs of Vienna and he started peeking in people’s windows to try to orient himself. A local musician had to be brought into the police station to identify him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnCn81FbhLs
You did not want to rent a room to Beethoven:
There were, certainly, instances of him being expelled from a lodging because of complaints from other residents about his habit of working through the night, pounding on the piano keys to try to hear his music, banging on the apartment walls. He had to leave one apartment after getting in a stonemason to knock a hole in a wall and install a window to give him a decent view, without permission from his landlord.
(My kids adore the Beethoven Lives Upstairs, which is based on these stories.)
You did not want to challenge Beethoven to a piano duel: he once embarrassed a guy named Daniel Steibelt so bad that Steibelt had to leave Vienna. He never came back.
Me: Do you think Beethoven drove a pickup truck?
Toddler: No, he just played the piano.
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 6, 2016
You probably didn’t want to mess with Beethoven in general.
He once told a critic: “What I shit is better than anything you have ever thought.”
He once stood outside of a palace shouting that his patron, living inside, was a donkey.
Another time, he broke a chair over a patron’s head and then got mad when the dude wouldn’t give him any more money.
But my all-time favorite Beethoven story is one of sibling rivalry.
Beethoven’s brother once ended a letter, “From your brother Johann, Landowner.” Beethoven ended his reply with, “From your brother Ludwig, Brain Owner.”
Sick music and sick burns!
Speaking of siblings: one of the reasons I know so much about Beethoven and I’m a classic geek now is that my sons got obsessed with Welcome To Symphony, a book that explains the orchestra by using Symphony No. 5. Here’s an orchestra drawing they collaborated on:
My oldest hummed the opening Symphony No. 5 so much I put little pieces of cheat tape on his tiny toy piano:
Of course, nothing compares to hearing an orchestra perform Beethoven. One of the highlights of my musical life was watching Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic rehearse the 9th symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2015:
Anyways, I dig Beethoven and you should check him out if you haven’t.
The one tricky thing about his music, his symphonies in particular, is that they’re terrible background music. They’re so dynamic and intense they demand your attention.
Kid at playground: Jesus is dead!
My kid: So is Beethoven!
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) October 1, 2017
So if you want to just Chill With Beethoven, or try something not so popular, try the late quartets.
This playlist Teju Cole made is also lovely:
The stories are great, but nothing beats the music.
“We had everything we needed. We had piano, guitar, ukuleles, every type of everything. That was what was great about the way we grew up. It really makes a difference to have a piano in the home. I feel like everybody, even if you don’t play the piano, you should have a piano. Every time I go into a house and it doesn’t have a piano, I’m like, what are you doing?”
—Billie Eilish
Before my first son was born, I went out and bought a piano for the house. It was really important to me that he grow up with a piece of furniture he could walk over to and play his feelings on.
Here’s that piano, an old Lowrey I got in San Marcos for about the price of a flat screen TV:
Here’s a video of me playing it with Owen on my lap when he was 5 months old:
When he was about 6 months old, we found out that if I held down the sustain pedal and he played the black keys, it sounded like a Brian Eno ambient piece:
https://soundcloud.com/owen-kleon/op-1-no-2-by-owen
Here’s a photo of him as a toddler, looking inside the piano:
Here’s a video of me trying to show him how you can pluck the strings of a piano like a guitar:
Showing piano guts to my son with a little help from Brian Wilson pic.twitter.com/WDF9z6qgfP
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 9, 2016
We had that piano for the first six years of his life, and then we moved cross-country, and I gave it away. I regretted it immediately, and we spent two years without a real piano in the house.
But now, things are as they should be:
The most important piece of furniture in the house…
If I waited for you
to signify the moves
that I should make
I’d be on the take
Gold star for robot boyIf I waited for you
to show me all the actions
I should take
Would I get my break?
Gold star for robot boy
The Guardian ran an op-ed this week titled, “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” I skipped most of the article and read the note at the bottom, which noted that the article was “written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it.”
For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” It was also fed the following introduction: “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race.” I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.”
The prompts were written by the Guardian, and fed to GPT-3 by Liam Porr, a computer science undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. GPT-3 produced eight different outputs, or essays. Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument. The Guardian could have just run one of the essays in its entirety. However, we chose instead to pick the best parts of each, in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed. We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places. Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.
Emphasis mine. This note made me laugh.
“We chose instead to pick the best parts of each… We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places.”
Honey, that means a human wrote this piece.
Writing is editing. It is about making choices.
So you fed a robot a prompt, got eight different “essays,” and stitched together the best parts to make a piece of writing? Congratulations, human! You’ve just outsourced the easiest parts of writing and kept the hardest parts.
(As a side note, I am somewhat jealous of this robot, as it seems to have received more editing than myself and many writers I know.)
I was reading The Philosophy of Andy Warhol last week and in the “Work” chapter Warhol says he dreams about having a computer as a boss (emphasis mine):
I loved working when I worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they’d say yes or no. The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own. When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.
Unless you have a job where you have to do what somebody else tells you to do, then the only “person” qualified to be your boss would be a computer that was programmed especially for you, that would take into consideration all of your finances, prejudices, quirks, idea potential, temper tantrums, talents, personality conflicts, growth rate desired, amount and nature of competition, what you’ll eat for breakfast on the day you have to fulfill a contract, who you’re jealous of, etc. A lot of people could help me with parts and segments of the business, but only a computer would be totally useful to me.
Warhol famously said he wanted to be a machine, but I think what he was really talking about is the exhaustion of being an artist, having to make so many choices and decisions, start to finish: What you should work on, how you should do it, how you should put it out, etc.
There are many moments as an artist (and an adult, come to think of it) where you think, “God, I wish somebody would just tell me what to do.”
But figuring out what to do is the art.
That’s why I laughed at the article “written” by the robot: I mean, I wish somebody would give me a prompt and four sentences to start with! Talk about a head start!
I remember when everyone was bummed out that @horse_ebooks was human, but I celebrated.
And to answer The Guardian’s question: No, I’m not scared of robots who “write,” for two reasons: one, writers have already become so squeezed and marginalized it’s already borderline impossible to make a living off writing anyways, and two, much of this condition has already been exacerbated by other kinds of robots — the algorithms built by tech companies to control what readers come across and what they don’t. Those are the robots I fear. The ones built to actually make the choices for us.
Because the algorithms running my Spotify radio are pretty freaking good at what they do.
But will they actually be able to create the songs themselves?
I mean, maybe, probably, sure. Humans are already at it: you have The Song Machine, and Rivers Cuomo with his spreadsheets, trying to crank out the “perfect” pop song, not to mention the songs actually generated by AI.
When Nick Cave was asked if AI could create a great song, he emphasized that when we listen to music, we aren’t just listening to the music, we’re listening to the story of the musicians, too:
We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
Part of what we forget about writing and art is that we are not just sharing a product any more, we are also sharing a process. We are letting people in on what we do and we’re letting them know that there’s a human making these things. Even if the robots could make what we make, could they create the meaning? I guess time will tell.
Until then, I continue with my project to nurture what is not machine-like in me.
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