austinkleon - Tumblr blog

[austinkleon]

Richard Serra in "Place" - Season 1 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21 - YouTube

MAN: What do you do in that book all the time, Richard? 

RICHARD SERRA: Um, I keep track of myself. 

MAN: Are you writing poetry?

RICHARD SERRA: No, it’s a way of keeping your eye and your hand together.

“I think the eye is kind of a muscle,” Serra says. “The more you draw, the better shape the muscle’s in. The better you see.”

[austinkleon]

Kraftwerk, Radio-Activity 

Been spinning this a lot lately. I really like what I wrote about this record for the 31 perfect records project back in 2020: 

I played Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” for my son Owen when he was 4 years old, and he became completely obsessed with the band. Kraftwerk, it turns out, is perfect music for little kids: they wrote simple, beautiful melodies to repetitive, exciting beats and they sang about real things that kids can understand, things like roads, radios, trains, robots, computers, and bicycles. For a while, Owen and I were going to the record store every week to buy a new Kraftwerk album. Owen never wanted vinyl, he only wanted CDs: He could handle them in his little fingers, and he could skip the tracks easily. Radio-Activity a record that often gets overlooked, but shows Kraftwerk, in some ways, at their most pure: it was their first fully electronic record and it’s a record built conceptually around their weird humor and love of wordplay. (For example, on their previous record, Autobahn: “Fahr’n Fahr’n Fahr’n auf der autobahn” is a pun on The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun”: “fahr’n” means “driving.”) Most concept records fall apart after a few songs, but Radio-Activity holds together the whole way through, from “Radioactivity” (“Radioactivity / is in the air for you and me”) to “Airwaves,” which has surf-rock vibes (“when airwaves swing / distant voices sing”) to my favorite track, “Antenna” (“I’m the antenna / catching vibration / you’re the transmitter / give information”). Several of the song titles are puns: “Radio Stars,” for example, sounds like a song about fame, but it’s actually about pulsars and quasars. And that’s the genius of Kraftwerk: simple enough for a kid to get into, but deep enough for any age. (Of all the bummers of COVID-19, missing Kraftwerk play in Texas this summer is high up there.) Kraftwerk made at least five perfect records, but this is one that deserves and rewards more listens.

[austinkleon]

Eugène Atget, Eclipse

From the Blanton Museum’s Art at Home newsletter:

French artist Eugène Atget (1857-1927) focused his lens on the city and people of Paris for nearly four decades, producing more than 8,500 pictures throughout his career. In his photograph Eclipse, a crowd is gathered in Paris’ Place de la Bastille to observe the 1912 solar eclipse. Rather than recording the astronomical event itself, Atget turned his attention to its spectators. Fun fact: Surrealist artist Man Ray bought Atget’s photograph to illustrate the June 1926 cover of La Révolution Surréaliste—a subversive publication that adopted a pseudo-scientific format to explore the irrational nature of existence

[austinkleon]

An interview with Mary Ruefle - Austin Kleon

[austinkleon]

Back to the beginning - Austin Kleon

[austinkleon]

Scientifically, tears are divided into three different types, based on their origin. Both tears of grief and joy are psychic tears, triggered by extreme emotions, whether positive or negative. Basal tears are released continuously in tiny quantities (on average, 0.75 to 1.1 grams over a 24-hour period) to keep the cornea lubricated. Reflex tears are secreted in response to an irritant, like dust, onion vapors or tear gas.

The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears | Science| Smithsonian Magazine

[austinkleon]

“This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience. Traditional editors identify an audience who will pay for their publication (or whom an advertiser will pay to reach) and then find a writer who can speak to that audience. As a blogger, I’ve enjoyed the delirious freedom to write exactly the publication I’d want to read, which then attracts other people who feel the same way.”

[austinkleon]

Keeping a "writer's notebook" in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can't slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas

Cory Doctorow

[austinkleon]

I love it when a PDF I get off the internet has the library card in the back

[austinkleon]

Dorothy Parker.

[austinkleon]

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

[austinkleon]

Henri Cole: “This is something Louise Glück told me. It hung over my desk for a decade. A credo for us all.”

(Eat that Halloween candy.)

[austinkleon]

John Berger drawings of pansies (from Cataract)

[austinkleon]

Gag Master volvelle

This delightful relic from 1963 accompanied Glenn Bretthauer’s How To Make Money With Simple Gags: A Complete Course in Gag Writing!, the cover of which can be seen below. One spin, and you too could be riding that G-Nib of success to the big paycheck in the stars.

(PS. Do not try to google “gag master”)

via Kevin H

[austinkleon]

Ruth Asawa sketchbook drawings (from the book Ruth Asawa Through Line — see more here)

[austinkleon]

“Want me to call the bike shop and see if they’ll sponsor your midlife crisis?” Calvin and Hobbes, August 2, 1992