Listening is the whole deal
10 things worth sharing this week
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to.” I liked Gary Hustwit’s new generative film about Brian Eno so much that I dedicated Tuesday’s newsletter to it. I highly recommend seeing it in a theater with good sound — even better if you can see one of Gary’s live events. (The soundtrack album, of course, is great.)
“Yeah! Cassettes do sound great!” I can’t believe it took me so long to see the gorgeous, quiet, meditative movie Perfect Days. It has a funny origin story: director Wim Wenders was invited to check out a public toilets project in Tokyo and instead of shooting a series of ads, he made a full-length movie about a toilet cleaner who leads a simple life, taking photos with a film camera, riding his bicycle, reading books, and listening to his favorite music on cassette tapes. It’s basically like somebody made a movie out of all the things I’m interested in… including the magic of bidets! Here’s a nice essay on the film by critic Bilge Ebiri, who said it’s “a film I wouldn't mind rewatching every day for the rest of my life.” (Again, great soundtrack.)
“Later you hear there’s a fourth dimension…” I think of Perfect Days as a spiritual cousin to Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, about a bus driver who writes poetry. In the words of Paul Constant, it’s a movie “to remind you why you love reading and writing.” (All of the poems in the movie were written by one of my favorite poets, Ron Padgett.)
“The compliments that mean the most to you reveal what your values are,” says Katherine Morgan Schafler. I’m still thinking about her book and how it finally helped me understand perfectionism.
When it rains in Austin you can hear tiny frogs chirping at night. It’s been cool and rainy lately — a glorious surprise for late July — and the frogs are back at it! Sometimes they wake me up at 3 or 4 a.m. and my mind is racing and my stomach is grumbling. Instead of lying in bed, I’ll get up and fix a cup of cereal and turn on the 24/7 Criterion Channel stream to see what’s on. Most recently I caught another film set in Tokyo, Makoto Shinkai’s The Garden of Words, about a 15-year-old aspiring shoemaker who meets a mysterious woman in the park while skipping school on a rainy day. Some gorgeous images in that film, including a cicada emerging from its shell. (The frogs chirp at night, and the cicadas scream during the day.)
“Listen to the birds. That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.” Captain Beefheart’s 10 commandments of guitar playing.
“People need to listen to way more music…To listen to music… and explore it and study it… Everything’s there.” I learned so, so much from this rare interview with Four Tet on making music. When he was asked what was his most important piece of musical equipment, he said his stereo system, because it allows him to “listen to music with that level of detail in a really deep way… I get a level of knowledge and inspiration simultaneously that serve me so well in everything else I do.”
Here’s how director Steven Soderbergh describes stealing like an artist: “Just looking at something and going, I like that, and then trying to break down, why do I like that? What is it about that… that I like? What do I steal? What can I repurpose or tweak to make it fit what we’re trying to do? It’s just homework, and the best part of this job is that your homework is watching great movies.”
“The act of writing is to me to listen,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel lecture. “When I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening… At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”
A final thought from Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: “There is a phrase, variations of which many of the subjects of this book ended up uttering at some point. As they were describing why they did this or that, they would say they ’listened’ to the work, or the work would ‘tell’ them what to do; the work would ’speak’ to them, as if a character in a book or a color on a canvas could issue orders…. For a long while, I dismissed this phrasing as cliché — more of the empty language people often employ to describe how they work because creation is so hard to describe. Eventually, however, I began to think that no, maybe listening was the whole deal.”
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If you need some (short) summer reading, the paperback of Steal Like an Artist is still 53% off and only $6.99 on Amazon. It’s a… steal.
xoxo,
Austin
PS. I’ve always liked this exercise from The Steal Like An Artist Journal:
speaking of the sound of cicadas - when my son was little he thought that was the sound the sun made when it was hot - i often think this would make a cool children's book about cicadas
I saw the title of this newsletter and got so excited! Thank you for listening to listening in this post. For me, Listening IS the whole deal. I wrote about listening in my dissertation which became my book and now the world seems to confirm the importance of listening constantly -- and listening tugs at my attention constantly. Here's my book, Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature: https://www.amazon.com/Race-Sounds-New-American-Canon/dp/1609385616?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=22b08a15-ab2f-4166-a755-222b9e8b4c54
I now draw on listening in the education leadership programs I run and the medical school class I teach.. Thank you again for this and all your newsletters!