Austin Kleon

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SHITT: Should I Try That?

From yesterday’s newsletter comes a new acronym I made up: SHITT, or “Should I Try That?”

We know that social media can cause FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but reading about how other people work can cause a variant of FOMO we’ll dub SHITT — SHould I Try That?

A silly example of SHITT: You’re having trouble with your writing and then you read about how So-and-So only writes longhand and all the sudden you think maybe you should start writing longhand. So you spend the whole day shopping for pens and paper, only to sit down the next morning and remember you hate your own handwriting.

Much like FOMO, how susceptible you are to SHITT depends on your mental state, how tender and vulnerable you are, and how well your own work is going.

Read more here.

McCartney on not-knowing and doing it now

Paul McCartney recording drums in a bathroom for McCartney II, 1980 (via)

I think anybody who is a Beatles fan sort of identifies with one Beatle or the other. When I was a kid, I wanted to be John. The older I get, the more I want to be Paul, granny music and all, moving his own microphone.

One thing I’m interested in is Paul’s insistence that he doesn’t really know where the music comes from. Years ago, I clipped this paragraph from a 2016 interview: 

You’ve never got it down. It’s this fluid thing, music. I kind of like that. I wouldn’t like to be blasé or think, ‘Oh you know I know how to do this.’ In fact I teach a class at a the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — I do a little songwriting class with the students — and nearly always the first thing I go in and say [is], ‘I don’t know how to do this. You would think I do, but it’s not one of these things you ever know how to do.

John Higgs expands on this in his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche:

After sixty years of interviews, it’s clear that McCartney does not understand why music comes so naturally to him, or flows out of him so easily, in a way that doesn’t happen to other people. He seems at times afraid that it might stop – he has never learned how to read music, for example, in case it breaks the way he works. As the Irish poet Paul Muldoon has said when discussing McCartney’s creativity, ‘It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.’

Another thing I admire is that McCartney doesn’t torture himself too much with his songwriting process. More from Love and Let Die:

McCartney places great emphasis on starting and finishing work immediately, before you have had the chance to overanalyse or come up with an excuse not to do it. This is an attitude that he credits his father with instilling in him. Whenever Paul or his brother Mike would try to get out of a chore by saying they would do it tomorrow, their father would tell them ‘D.I.N. – do it now’. As he explains, ‘you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through’. This approach paid dividends when he came to work with John Lennon. Every time they sat down to write a song they would finish it, and they never once came away from a writing session having failed to come up with something. “I’m all for that way of working,’ he has said. ‘Once John and I or I alone started a song, there was nowhere else to go; we had to finish it, and it was a great discipline. There’s something about doing it when you have the vision.’

“There was no writer’s block or hoping for inspiration in McCartney’s writing life,” Higgs writes. “The music just came and all he had to do was get it down before it was lost.”

(I also think it’s interesting that McCartney says he used to pull The Fool card in Tarot readings.)

Increasingly, I look to incorporate “not knowing” and “do it now” into my work. Whether it’s a newsletter or a blackout poem or a collage, or whatever, I try to walk into the studio not knowing exactly what I’m going to do — I just show up and I say to myself that I’ve got to have something by the time I leave. This constraint of time and space usually leads to something, if not something good.

Why don’t you hire an assistant?

Frankenstein (1931) / Young Frankenstein (1974)

When I wrote about using an AI as an assistant a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’ve always resisted hiring an assistant.

Last Friday the kids selected Frankenstein (1931) as our pizza night viewing. It’s a wonderful movie, directed brilliantly by David Whale.

I laughed a lot at this scene in which Dr. Frankenstein sends his assistant, Fritz, to go steal a brain for the monster. Fritz drops the “normal” brain in the lab so he takes the “abnormal” brain instead. This scene was later parodied in the also-brilliant Young Frankenstein (1974).

Some trivia: Fritz does not appear in Mary Shelley’s novel! Fritz was invented for an 1823 adaptation by Richard Brinsley Peake for his play, Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein. In the early scripts for the 1931 movie, Fritz was mute, and, supposedly, this scene with the brains was only added late in the process. (Fritz also tortures the monster and, in general, makes things worse.)

Shelley’s Frankenstein is often mentioned these days as a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, but read another way, the 1931 version of Frankenstein is a cautionary tale about hiring an assistant to do your dirty work!

In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game, he writes about “one of the best pieces of advice” he ever got: “to have no assistant.”

The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering—and its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way. (By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities). This is a via negativa approach: you want maximal free time, not maximal activity, and you can assess your own “success” according to such metric. Otherwise, you end up assisting your assistants, or being forced to “explain” how to do things, which requires more mental effort than doing the thing itself. In fact, beyond my writing and research life, this has proved to be great financial advice as I am freer, more nimble, and have a very high benchmark for doing something, while my peers have their days filled with unnecessary “meetings” and unnecessary correspondence.

Taleb also writes, of trying to “optimize” the writing and art-making process in general:

Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.

Of course, art history is full of assistants and whole workshops full of helpers, and many of the great artists were at one time apprenticed to a master.

Maybe that’s the important point: making a distinction between assistants and apprentices.

Because they eventually want the master’s job, apprentices have more skin in the game…

The making of Lilo & Stitch

Somehow, it took me 21 years to see Lilo & Stitch. A huge pizza night blockbuster with our crew.

It is so satisfying to me when you see something and you think, “This is so unlike everything else… how did this even get made?” And the answer turns out to be: “Well, it wasn’t made like everything else.”

In “An Oral History of Lilo & Stitch,” the writer Bilge Ebiri tells the story of how the movie came to be. Basically, it was done for a tiny (for Disney) budget, with a tiny (for Disney) crew, in a “secret hangar” in Florida, far away from the eyes of Disney leadership in Burbank. They’d just worked on Mulan, which was sort of a nightmare, and this time they wanted to do things differently:

We said, “Okay, here’s the deal. We have a lot less money. We have less time. But we want to figure out how we can make this movie so that everybody goes home at night to have dinner with their loved ones. Everybody gets a weekend. We’ll figure out how to make this and be happy doing it.” That became the spirit of making the film.

They did wild stuff like going old school and choosing to use watercolor backgrounds like in the 1930s. The only trouble was, almost nobody was alive who knew how to do it. Luckily they went to see Maurice Noble, who painted backgrounds on Snow White:

Maurice Noble was one of my heroes, and he was in his 80s. He used to work for Disney in the ’40s and ’50s. He could hardly see. One great technique that he told me about: There were these rocks in Peter Pan, in the Mermaid Cove, with beautiful rock texture. I asked, “How’d you get this texture?” He said, “The secret is sea salt — very coarse-grain sea salt.” Now, I had tried to get that texture so many times, and I knew about the salt technique, but I never knew you used sea salt. So all the lava rocks in Lilo & Stitch — it was all sea salt. It came right from Maurice Noble.

They also went on location in Hawaii because they didn’t believe you could really get the light and color right without visiting:

One day we were sitting on the beach at night having dinner by the ocean. The sun was setting and the waves were coming in. The water was turquoise, but the sea foam was pink. “How can the white foam be affected that much by the color of the sky, but not the water?” You’ll see in the surfing scene, we did that. Most people would’ve just done the water with white foam or grayish blue foam. We made it pink because that’s what we saw.

The whole piece is worth reading. (It reminded me a lot of reading about the making of Mad Max: Fury Road. That movie really shouldn’t exist. It is what it is because of the process of making it.)

In fact, now I’m wondering if that’s one way you know something is great? When you say: “How does this even exist?”

One thing leads to another

In Show Your Work! I wrote about a way of working I call “chain smoking”: lighting the beginning of one project up with the end of another.

“We work because it’s a chain reaction,” Charles Eames said.

Each piece leads to the next.

One thing leads to another.

I wanted to show you four collages I made in sequence to show how my chain smoking actually plays out.

The collage on the above right, “Get Back,” began with the old image of Circleville, my hometown, which was ripped from a box of Wittich’s chocolates my mom brought for Christmas. I made it on New Year’s Eve.

(I don’t usually give my collages titles, but I am in this case, just for clarity.)

This next collage, “Go,” was made in my diary on the page facing “Get Back” a few hours later. It started as scraps of tape I didn’t use in “Get Back, ” then I added the security envelope pattern to match, and found some old onion prints I had made on newsprint that seemed to echo the wheel of Circleville. 

I much prefer “Go” to “Get Back” — it’s looser, more visually interesting.

I wasn’t trying too hard.

I made this piece, “10-2-4,” on New Year’s Day, with the label from the box of a 4-pack of Dr. Pepper my son Owen got for Christmas. (10, 2, and 4 are the times of day the Dr. Pepper company research showed that people needed a pick-me-up.) I added even more onion prints from the newsprint I’d pulled out for “Go.”

The afternoon after I made “10-2-4,” I started the piece on the left, “Waves.” What’s interesting is that the beginning of the piece doesn’t actually show up in the finished piece: I had started with Sinclair Lewis’s head from the NYTimes Book Review, and thought it’d be cool to have the onion prints exploding out of his head:

I didn’t think this was very interesting at all, but I liked the way the waves looked — they reminded me of Hokusai — so I simply covered up the head:

 

I should note that almost none of this was planned out, and I wasn’t conscious of this chain when it was happening. When I make these pieces, I’m in a flow zone, working with mostly just instinct, moving things around on the page.

What’s remarkable to me is that in each pairing, it was the piece made of “leftovers” that led me to the most interesting place.

That’s the beauty of collage and working with real materials: when you don’t have a plan, when you don’t know where you’re going, you end up somewhere you didn’t anticipate.

It’s real discovery.

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If you like behind-the-scenes posts like this, you’ll love my newsletter.

A portrait of my brain working on 3 talks

Usually when a client hires me to speak, they’re interested in one talk, so I either have to narrow down the scope of what I’m going to talk about, or I have to try to weave in elements from all of my work into some kind of unified theory. A client recently hired me to do something I’ve never done before: three talks over three days!

Conveniently, I have a trilogy of books that map nicely to 3 talks, but because each subsequent book after Steal grew out of the one before it, there’s a bit of crosstalk between them. (For example, the chapters “Something small, every day” from Show, “Every day is Groundhog Day” from Keep Going, and “Be Boring” from Steal all speak to the idea of daily practice and routine.) So, funny enough, I’m combining what I usually do for talks: narrowing each book down to an essential idea, and then building up each talk by weaving in material from all over…

The Goldilocks Theory

I drew this comic in my diary yesterday. With all this talk of languishing and wintering, I have felt my spirit lifting a bit this week. I have a sensation, quite possibly inaccurate, that the day-to-day of my life is moving out of the crushing into the merely annoying. This is usually a very ripe condition in which to grow my efforts! If life is too crushing, it’s hard to get to work, and if life is too good, who the hell wants to work?

The hassles of work become a welcome distraction from the hassles of life. Of course, if I want to sustain any kind of lasting effort, I have to work every day, no matter what is going on, and expect nothing, but the applying of ye ass to chair.

Camus: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Every day is Groundhog Day.

This was true before the pandemic, by the way. The comic at the top of this post is a redrawing of this comic I drew in my diary four years ago.

Life is a porridge. Some porridge is too hot. Some porridge is too cold.

This porridge is just right.

He could sing the phone book (or an oven manual)

“People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.”
—Edith Piaf

“Elton would say to me, “Why don’t you put out more albums?” I would say, “Why don’t you put out less albums?”
—Billy Joel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oio83_iHIwg

In this clip from 1997’s An Audience With Elton John, the actor Richard E. Grant asks Elton John if he can create a song out of his oven’s instruction manual. Elton obliges.

This might seem miraculous, but it’s, essentially, exactly how Elton John works in his partnership with Bernie Taupin:

[Taupin] labors for weeks on his horse ranch in Southern California and delivers the lyrics fully formed to Mr. John, who goes into a studio, props the papers on the piano and churns out melodies and harmonies to fit the words at breakneck speed. “It’s kind of spooky,” Mr. John said in an interview. “I get bored if it takes more than 40 minutes.”

John says he barely looks at the lyrics before he goes into the studio to write. He says he likes to go in fresh, and let the lyrics evince melodies and music out of him.

This way of working goes all the way back to their very first days of collaborating, including their first hit, “Your Song”:

“I wrote that song one morning when Elton and I shared an apartment in Northwood Hills just outside of London. And I remember writing it as I was having breakfast. The original lyric had tea-stains on it.”

“[Elton] wrote it the same day. We went into the room where the piano was and just hammered it out.”

In the second volume of Paul Zollo’s wonderful Songwriters on Songwriting, Taupin displays an unreserved awe for his partner’s “borderline genius”:

It’s ridiculous. He has written four songs in a day sometimes. Sometimes he doesn’t even write songs before he goes into the studio. He goes in the studio on the morning that they are going to start recording and writes a couple of songs, and when they come in he starts recording. Go figure.

It’s hilarious to me that Taupin works so hard on his lyrics and John is so casual with them:

I put them all in a folder. And he just goes to the piano, puts the folder up, and sees what catches his eye. He’ll skim through it. I’m sure he looks at titles too. Sometimes he won’t even read through a lyric. He’ll just start. [Laughs] He won’t even understand what the song’s about till probably it’s recorded, and six months later he’ll come up to me and say, “You know, just figured out what that song’s about.”

You could give him the phone book — or an oven manual! — and he’d write you a song.

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