Austin Kleon

Dance in the Ruins (a November mixtape)

Here’s another mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.

This one started out with Human League’s “Love Action” playing on repeat in my head, followed by Mary Wells’ “You Beat Me To The Punch.” At first I thought I might continue the pattern and just alternate British synthpop with Motown for the whole mix — post-industrial meets industrial, in the terms of Everybody in the Place — but I try to go for vibe vs. theme with these mixes.

SIDE A

– Human League, “Love Action”
– Mary Wells, “You Beat Me To The Punch”
– Yaz, “Situation”
– Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters, “A Quiet Place”
– Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”
– The Chordettes, “Mr. Sandman”
– Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!”
– Melodians Steel Orchestra, “Symphony in D Minor” (snippet/tape ran out)

SIDE B
– Radiohead, “Worrywort”
– The Smiths, “Well I Wonder”
– Cocteau Twins, “Heaven or Las Vegas”
– The Durutti Column, “Future Perfect”
– Donald & The Delighters, “Elephant Walk”
– Pet Shop Boys, “West End Girls”
– Destroyer, “It’s Gonna Take an Airplane” (faded out before the tape ran out)

I can’t remember where I heard “A Quiet Place” — I thought it was some TV show, but it might’ve been Walter Martin’s radio show, which is where I heard “Elephant Walk.”

I could not resist another Leonard Cohen track, as it is his season, and funny enough, it’s in the same exact #5 track spot as last month’s mix. (I thought the Chordettes were the perfect juxtaposition — my 9-year-old son Jules loves “Mr. Sandman.”)

The steel band track is from the artist Jeremy Deller’s English Magic — written by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The Radiohead track is an old b-side of theirs I love. I’ve been looking for an excuse to use “Well I Wonder” on a mix ever since I watched The Killer.

I’ve been listening to the Cocteau Twins’ Four Calendar Cafe a bunch this year, but I thought “Heaven or Las Vegas” fit better.

There was something about that cheesy horn on “West End Girls” that made me think of the MIDI orchestration on Destroyer’s Your Blues. A perfect ending, IMO.

Lots of other weird coincidences popped up in the mix that I didn’t realize when I was making it, but I’ll leave it to you to discover them for yourself.

You can listen to the mix on Spotify or on Apple Music.

I’ve made 12 mixes so far this year — if you want, you can listen to a big 9-hour playlist of them all.

Oh one more thing: I taped over Toni Childs’ House of Hope for this mix — I realized if I flipped the liner notes inside out, the word HOPE was spelled out on the back.

Tacos with Chase Jarvis

I had tacos with Chase Jarvis earlier this year and he asked if he could record part of our chat on voice memos.

I’ve written more about a lot of the topics we chatted about and wanted to link to them here:

  • “Comfort Work,” like “comfort food” and “comfort viewing,” comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do. It is actual work, but it is comforting.
  • “Creative tension” — a lot of creative work is the result of being pulled between two poles, and finding energy in the tension of that pull. Think of a guitar string: if it’s too slack, the string buzzes and makes no music; if it’s too tight, it snaps.
  • Friction, or “Resistance is necessary.” Artists need something to push against. Like when you’re riding a bike — too much or too little friction means you won’t go anywhere.
  • Subtraction: This gets a whole chapter in Steal Like an Artist, but basically the idea is that when you subtract certain elements and put some constraints on yourself, it actually activates your creativity rather than squashing it.

You can listen to the whole chat here and check out our typewriter interview.

Everybody in the place

This afternoon I doodled while watching artist Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody In The Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984?–?1992. 

Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously impregnable boundaries of class, identity, and geography.

At one point in the documentary he shows a bunch of students one of my favorite clips of all-time: a bunch of people in a club Detroit in 1981 dancing to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers.”

“I’m happy that I live on a planet where that happened once,” he says.

After I made these notes and posted them here, I started reading Deller’s retrospective, Art is Magic, and in the very first chapter there’s a drawing, “The History of the World,” that he made in 1996:

“Everybody in the Place is, more or less, The History of the World mind map made into a film,” he writes. “The map is basically the script.”

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