Austin Kleon

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A plan and not enough time

Here’s a scan of the collage I made for the “Autumn Leaves” mixtape at the top of today’s newsletter.

What happened was: I’d been toying with making a new mixtape anyways, and I needed a top image for the newsletter, so I went over to my stack of sealed cassettes I’ve purchased for $1 and right on top was Roger Williams Plays All-Time Romantic Favorites, which had a beautiful image on the front of a piano in what looks like fall foliage? And not just that, but Side A Track 1 was… “Autumn Leaves.”

This is the kind of spooky stuff that happens when I make newsletters and mixtapes.

* * *

On a separate note: I find there is very little correlation between how easy or hard a newsletter is to put together and how great or mediocre it winds up being. (I like to think I never turn in a bad newsletter.)

This one was really difficult to put together — I spent most of the day on it, between writing and making the mix — and I felt like I was grasping for stuff to include… and then Meghan and a bunch of other readers told me how much they liked it!

This happens all the time. You just never know.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes the best newsletters come when the writer is super busy and doesn’t have enough time and they just drop the bits and bobs they’ve got in there and get out.

Like Leonard Bernstein said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

You can read today’s newsletter here.

Autumn leaves (a September mixtape)

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

I wasn’t planning on making a mix in September, as I considered the “Make Time Stop” mixtape the real September mixtape, just made in advance. But something called to me today, so I went for it.

Mostly jazz, because that’s pretty much all I’ve been listening to, with a few detours:

SIDE A

– Cannonball Adderley, “Autumn Leaves”
– John Coltrane, “My Favorite Things”
– Bill Withers, “Can We Pretend”
– Vince Guaraldi, “Peppermint Patty”
– Bill Evans Trio, “Waltz For Debby”

SIDE B

– Miles Davis, “’Round Midnight”
– Miles Davis, “Milestones”
– Vikingur Olafsson, “Bruyeres” (by Debussy, home recording)
– Mulatu Astatke, “Tezeta (Nostalgia)”
– Vince Guaraldi, “Great Pumpkin Waltz”
– Charlie Parker, “Perdido” (live at Massey Hall)
– Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, “Song Of Abayi”
– Jack Kerouac (w/ Steve Allen on piano), “Charlie Parker”

I don’t know about this one. It went all over the place. The “Great Pumpkin Waltz” on side two feels a little much to me? But that “Peppermint Patty” after Bill Withers felt right. (I don’t know what possessed me with “Can We Pretend” — it’s just one of my favorite songs.)

I tried to use physical media as much as possible for this one, although while I was recording the tape I realized that my turntable was picking up the rumble from me rolling across the room in my chair.

No rumble online, but less character:

This is the 10th mixtape I’ve made this year — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 7+ hour playlist out of them.

Filed under: mixtapes

Human resources

Today’s newsletter, “Human Resources,” is about what we can learn in art, business, and family life from how Duke Ellington ran his band, as detailed in Ted Gioia’s How To Listen To Jazz:

“Almost every important piece Ellington ever composed was written to showcase the key skills he heard in his band members. Music almost became a platform for Ellington’s management of human resources… Ellington’s executive skills could be compared to Benny Goodman’s, and the contrast was striking. Goodman was a perfectionist who was rarely pleased with the musicians he hired, and they burnt out on his intensity, many leaving the band after only a short stint. Ellington’s orchestra thrived, in contrast, because the boss didn’t demand perfection, and instead built everything in the ensemble’s repertoire on the demonstrated strengths of his personnel. I suspect that this approach to leadership could work in any environment…”

Many readers mentioned how much they liked the drawings, which pleased me, as they’re all over a decade old, many from when I was drawing a lot at Austin City Limits tapings.

You can read the newsletter here.

Cut out verbs


I usually don’t make art specifically for the newsletter, but I needed a top image for today’s edition, so I cut out Words from ads in the April 1935 issue of National Geographic.

Read the newsletter: “Verbify!”

Verbifying with Dylan

Entries from my trusty American Heritage Dictionary

First, off: “verbify” is a word. It means what it sounds like: use something as a verb.

In 2015, the late comedian Norm Macdonald tweeted about the time he met Bob Dylan.

According to Macdonald, they talked about all kinds of stuff, like their favorite books of the Bible. (Norm said he liked Job, Bob said he liked Ecclesiastes.)

At one point, Macdonald said, “I remember he talked over and over about verbs and about ‘verbifying’, how anything could be ‘verbified.’”

Dylan’s notebooks for Blood on the Tracks

The writer Tony Conniff wrote a piece about Dylan’s use of verbs and used “Tangled Up in Blue” as an example:

They drove that car as far as they could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best

She turned around to look at him
As he was walkin’ away
She said this can’t be the end
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”

Tangled Up In Blue

“So much of the story,” Conniff writes, “is in the rich, vivid, and active verbs. It’s something you can find in almost any Dylan song.”

Of course, it ain’t like no other songwriter has ever talked about verbs before.

“When you’re writing a song,” said Chuck Berry, “nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”

UPDATE (9/20/2024): A reader sent me this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon about “verbing”:

Filed under: Verbs.

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