Artist/cartoonist Gary Panter signed his new book and gave a slideshow presentation at Domy Books last night. My buddy Adam has the last word:

Here are some good pictures of the same event at the Houston store.

My wife loves to sew and she’s quite the craft-blog connoisseur, so this afternoon she dragged me over to the first Austin CRAFT Magazine Release Party for a little bit. Amazingly, I wasn’t the only guy there. I sat and doodled and ate cupcakes and watched everybody crafting, and it got me thinking about do-it-yourself, and how our generation as a whole is becoming more interested in making things. (Witness Maker Faire.)

I also started thinking about artists who not only make their art, they TEACH others how to make art. This, in a way, not only makes them even more beloved to their pre-existing fans, it also makes them new fans, and new patrons: when you teach someone how to make a certain type of art, you are, in effect, generating more interest for your art form, and creating more consumers for it.

But even more important, you’re welcoming people into a club. “You too can make art! It helps your soul grow! Join us!”

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

Not only that: the market for a club to belong to is infinite.

My buddy Tim and I went to see writer Michael Chabon (”Shea as in stadium, Bon as in Jovi”) at Bookpeople last night. There were at least 100 people there. I picked up a copy of his beautiful new non-fiction collection with a Jordan Crane-designed cover.

During the Q&A, Chabon remarked of one of his characters, “He was too verbose and too Jewish.”

When he signed my book to “Meg + Austin,” I said, “Meg is my wife—she really likes your stuff.”

And Chabon (who seems like a really nice guy, by the way) joked, “Oh, and you don’t think it’s so hot?”

And I blushed and restrained myself from quoting his Q&A.

(Brilliant storyteller, but dang, he can be long-winded!)

Here’s Tim and I hanging out beforehand:

Good times!

PS. Wonder Boys is one of the greatest movies ever made. Not joking. And it has a kick-ass soundtrack. Go watch it.

PPS: The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon.

Not all of the songs I write will be good ones. Actually, a lot of them will be ridiculously bad (experience has also taught me not to show those songs to anyone for obvious reasons). But when an honest, four-dimensional, hook-filled piece of humanity is finally born, there is a clue to recognizing it’s timelessness. There is a peaceful, non-judgmental appreciation that falls over me when I hear it, a feeling — or even a knowledge — that we songwriters really had nothing to do with its creation in the first place. It’s as if we were archaeologists at a dig and all we had to do was chip away the stone and brush away the sand that hid it from view. We were just lucky enough to be in the room that day when it showed up to sing to us.—Darrell Brown, “The Three Hs (Honesty, Humanity, Hooks)“

* * *

* * *

I met a printmaker a few weeks ago and he was going into his lengthy process, the many stages of sketches and drafts he goes through. He didn’t have a website, and I suggested that he should think about just starting a Flickr account and a blog to get himself out there, start a viewership, etc.

His response was, “I don’t want to start creating work for the internet.”

I asked him to explain.

He said, “A lot of the artists I know who start posting their stuff on the net…they start CREATING their work for the net.”

Now, as an artist who has embraced blogging whole-heartedly, at first I found this to be really, well, kind of backwards. I mean, my kind of ideal business plan for young artists these days is: embrace the net, put yourself online, create a readership, find a way to sell your stuff directly to your readership. Forget galleries, forget publishing deals.

But I have to admit: since I started blogging, my art has changed. Instead of writing short stories, I do visual poems. I’ve gone from thinking about doing a graphic novel to thinking about doing a webcomic.

It’s the nature of the beast: shorter, more visual, faster. A click of the mouse, and thousands of people can see my stuff and give me feedback.

And I wonder: is the internet helping me to think “big” or think “small”? Is using my blog as my primary artistic outlet limiting my work?

Back to the printmaker: he makes these huge, colorful monoprints—stuff that you probably can’t process on a tiny screen. How can putting it online help him and not detract from his vision?

My answer is to document the process-side of the work: the “small” stuff. The sketches, photos of the in-progress prints, etc.

But still, I wonder: does making our art live online create a temptation for us to think “smaller” not “bigger”? And as my friend Tim points out, maybe it’s not a bad thing?

* * *

* * *

Narrative art is about storytelling in the clearest possible ways. In illustration an artist can direct what the eye sees first, second, and third. You could even parse an illustration as one would a sentence, with a subject, predicate, object, as well as adjectives and prepositions. Your eye, in about a nanosecond, may be tracked looking at the elements of “The Creation” (at Michelangelo’s firm direction) in this order: 1. The hand of God, 2. Who is a powerful and beneficent presence, 3. Who is reaching from his Heaven, 4. Surrounded by angels, 5. Touches and gives life to, 6. Adam, an ordinary guy, in the, 7. world below. The artist is in control and the picture tells a story. A very successful illustration! It is in the area of thinking in pictures that illustrators do the heavy lifting. The finishing of a piece of art is nothing compared to the struggle to get the thinking right. There must be extreme economy as well as meaning. To me where simplicity meets power is what constitutes eloquence, the big “E.” It’s the thing you work for.— Steve Brodner, excerpt from Freedom Fries

* * *

It’s time to kill. And it’s time to enjoy the killing. Because by killing, you will make something else even better live. Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.— Ira Glass on storytelling

Sunday afternoon I went to the Ransom Center to see Jack Kerouac’s original “scroll” manuscript for ON THE ROAD. It’s quite a sight—crumbling on the edges, but still very readable. Kerouac cut drawing paper into long strips and taped it together so that he could write uninterrupted, “spontaneous” prose. The scroll is essentially non-fiction: none of the names have been changed…

“I first met Dean not long after my father died.” That’s the way the first draft begins. He later changed it to say, “I first met Dean after my wife and I split up.”

Why?

The last line of the book mentions “Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found.” That would’ve made for such great symmetry! Losing the father, searching for the father, never finding him.

What happens when you kill something good?

There’s a part in the scroll that I don’t remember reading in the book that goes like this:

My mother once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness….[husbands] getting drunk while the women stay home with the babies of the everdarkening future…if these men stop the machine and come home—and get on their knees—peace will suddenly descend on the earth…

Boy, do I like that quote.

This documentary was so good and so long (145 minutes!) that I made two pages of notes. Particularly great were the monologues by Noam Chomsky and Ray Anderson.

Link:

• An excerpt from the film dealing with the relationship between American corporations and Nazi Germany

Beautiful weather. Great venue. Fantastic lineup. Thought I was going to pee my pants waiting in line for a port-o-john, but ended up okay. We had a great spot in the shade:

Drew & Sonia (they’re getting married tomorrow!), my old friend Marty (4 years since I saw him!), his fiancee Marion (I finally got to meet her!), and Meg.

Marty with a $1 PBR and a free ice cream sandwich. Doesn’t get any better than that.

I don’t crosshatch. I don’t like to put a line through another line.
— Tony Millionaire

Doodling a lot with my sumi-e brush:

And drawing on the bus with a big, fat chisel-tip marker (keeps you from being too precious with your line):

As a woodcut artist, I’ve always been attracted to black-and-white art. I think it has something to do with the rich contrasts. I love a deep rich black that you can stare into, forever. The effect is like our colorful world torn down to its base so that we can read the unerlying message. The truth is always easier to take in black and white. Typography is always more legible in black and white, so why would we be surprised to find the readability of artworks enhanced by those contrasts? Remove the grays and hues, reduce the image to lines and solid blacks, and open up the whites. You have a thing of beauty and simplicity.

Another way to understand our attraction to black and white is through the science of how we see. The human eye consists of rods and cones that process the reflected light of our world. These signals are then translated into color and form for processing by our brain. The rods, which are sensitive only to black and white, are the first components activated in a baby’s eyes. That’s why infants readily respond to high-contrast black-and-white images. We are hardwired to appreciate black-and-white artwork.

—George A. Walker, preface to Graphic Witness

My neighborhood polling location is McCallum High School, which is only a couple blocks from our place, so after work I grabbed a New Yorker and my sketchbook and headed over to face the lines.

There’s something really great about being able to see a bunch of the folks from your neighborhood in the same high school cafeteria. Here are some sketches I did while standing in line:

[Hillary Clinton] must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself.
— Frank Rich, “The Audacity of Hopelessness“

I saw there was no reason to think that [comics] were intrinsically a limited form… ‘Cause you could choose ANY word that was in the dictionary… You got the same choice of words as SHAKESPEARE… and you got a huge variety of art styles that you could use. Comix are WORDS and PICTURES… WORDS AND PICTURES… you can do ANYTHING with WORDS and PICTURES…— Harvey Pekar

I asked my mother, what should I teach my kids? She said don’t teach them anything, just give them lots of supplies.— Tony Millionaire

Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.— Judge Judy

Tobias Wolff gave a fiction reading at UT tonight. He read from Old School, In Pharaoh’s Army, and a short story from a new collection, Our Story Begins, called “Her Dog,” in which a man has a conversation with his dead wife’s dog. I could not BELIEVE he read such a story, because Meg has been BEGGING me for a dog, and being the heartless bastard I am, I have refused her on logical grounds (they’re expensive, someone has to feed them, walk them, take care of them when you want to leave town, blah blah blah), the same positions the man in the story took with his wife, before she got a dog anyways, and he then declared the dog to be HER dog, and he would have nothing to do with caring for it, and then she dies, and then he’s stuck with this dog.

In other words, it was a story about a guilty man with his dead wife’s dog—read to a guilty man with a wife with no dog.

In other words, it hit close to home.

A good reading, only rivaled by the wonderful picnic dinner Meg fixed us to eat beforehand. Nice to finally get to see/hear him read, because he’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ve met a few of his students (Dan Chaon, George Saunders, Tom Perrotta), but never the man himself.

Afterwards, Meg came up with a new system for Q & A sessions: you submit questions on index cards before the reading, and then the writer pulls the questions out of a hat, reads them off, and answers them. This takes all the ego out of question-asking—you don’t get anyone trying to show off or flatter the writer, and people who might not feel comfortable asking a question in front of a live audience get a chance, too.

Crappy shot from my camera phone: