Austin Kleon

Keep it on The One

Prince would get mad when people called his music magical: “Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules.”

Here’s Bootsy Collins laying down the #1 rule of funk: Keep it on the one.

“It’s however you feel, you just gotta fit it in that little space that you’ve got…. Once you got it, you can do anything you want to do with it! Just keep it on THE ONE!”

(Lynda Barry shows this video to her comics classes.)

Collins learned about The One from his former bandleader James Brown. Collins thought he was “killin’ ’em” with all his wild playing, but Brown set him straight:

“Son, give me the one. You give me the one, you can do all those other things.” So, I started to understand: If I give you the one, I can do all these other crazy things.” James Brown was the one that told me: “Son, you need to give me the one.” […] He didn’t know the power of that. That changed my whole life. Once I learned where the one was at? It was on.”

What did James Brown himself say about The One? In the introduction to his biography, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, RJ Smith quotes him:

“The ‘One’ is derived from the Earth itself, the soil, the pine trees of my youth. And most important, it’s on the upbeat—ONE two THREE four—not the downbeat, one TWO three FOUR, that most blues are written. Hey, I know what I’m talking about! I was born to the downbeat, and I can tell you without question there is no pride in it. The upbeat is rich, the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive ‘One,’ not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat. In the end, it’s not about music—it’s about life.”

The One is both practical and mystical.  It’s about artistic freedom through the constraint of form, but it’s also about something bigger.

Here’s Miles Davis at the end of his autobiography:

I have never felt this creative. I feel like the best if yet to come. Like Prince says when he’s talking about hitting the beat and getting to the music and the rhythm, I’m going to keep “getting up on the one,” brother, I’m just going to try to keep my music getting up on the one, getting up on the one every day I play. Getting up on the one. Later.

Listen to the voice

“Neighbors,” 2014

I’m still thinking about that interview with Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk:

The show’s most frequent listener these days might in fact be Ray himself. He said he still listens to the show “all the time,” mostly to hear his brother’s voice and remind himself about times they had together. To remind himself of the jokes they shared. To remind himself of the good times.

“I love to hear his laugh, and I love to hear his take on things,” Ray said. “It’s a rare opportunity that I’ve had to still communicate with my brother that most people don’t get.”

A few years ago at I heard Cord Jefferson tell a story at Pop Up Magazine about a voicemail his mother left him a month before she died of cancer, and about “the power of the human voice and what we lose when a voice goes away.” (At one point he cites a study that concluded a Mother’s phone call is as comforting as a hug.) “It seems increasingly worth considering what we’re missing out on when we neglect the voices of the people we love.”

My wife and I used to make homemade audiobooks with our phones and play them for the boys in the stroller. Now the boys can read on their own, and I wonder whether those recordings will survive, whether anyone will ever listen to them again.

My mom has an old tape of me at age 5, singing Christmas songs for her. A few years ago, I archived it onto a CD so she could play it on her boombox whenever she wants.

My first grader has recorded songs for several years now, and he’s so obsessed with recording everything around him that he asks me at least once a day to record something on my phone. Until this moment, I haven’t realized what a favor he’s been doing me. I can listen to his little voice wherever I am, whenever I want, as long as my hard drives last.

Mechanics who hate cars

I used to take my ’97 Honda Accord to Sam Bell at the Lusty Wrench in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He recently closed up his shop after 40 years, and this is what he had to say about cars:

I was reminded of Sam when I read this profile of Car Talk’s Ray Magliozzi:

Let’s get something out of the way up front: Ray Magliozzi hates cars. And not in a my-car-is-a-pain-in-the-ass-and-it’s-always-breaking kind of way (though there is some of that too), but in a they’re-killing-the-planet kind of way. “How could you not?” Ray told me earlier this year. “They’re ruining the fabric of our lives.”

Ray talked to a podcast called The War on Cars about how much his brother and co-host Tom Magliozzi hated cars, too:

It was kind of odd that we did the show together for so many years, but he hated the idea of cars consuming our lives, our money, clogging up the streets, polluting the air, all the things that you hate, too…. My brother hated cars. And yet he—for years and years, I tried to convince him that if he didn’t live in Cambridge and wasn’t able to get around with public transportation or by walking, he’d have to have a car that was reliable…. But he was against cars because of all the things they do to our lives and to our world. And I agree on all of those points.

That was, of course, part of the genius of Car Talk: You didn’t have to even like cars to enjoy listening to it. (Or making it, obviously.)

The same was true of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting. From a 2001 NYTimes piece:

Ross’s expanding circle of viewers are, for the most part, not even painting, nor do they have any plans to start. They watch because ”The Joy of Painting” is the most relaxing show on television….

“It’s funny to talk to these people,” said Joan Kowalski, the media director of Bob Ross Inc. and Walt’s daughter. “Because they think they’re the only ones who watch to take a nap. Bob knew about this. People would come up to him and say, `I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’ve been putting me to sleep for 10 years.’ He’d love it.”

“There are people who just like to hear him talk,” one station manager said. “We even get letters from blind people who say they tune in because he gives them hope.”

And while we’re talking famous public media figures, Mister Rogers hated television and only got into it because he thought he could make it a lot better.  (A kind of negative self-definition.)

Take this job and shove it

In his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris writes about this paradox at the heart of American parenting: On the one hand, we think of childhood as a place that should be free of labor — we’ve decided, collectively, that it’s inhumane for our children to slave in sweatshops or dig in a coal mine —  and on the other hand, between the classroom, homework, and the extra-curricular activities picked to make a child the perfect college applicant, American kids work all the time.

[I]t takes a lot of work to prepare yourself to compete for twenty-first-century employment. Adults are happy to remind kids of this, telling them, “Put your nose to the grindstone,” “Stay on the right path,” “Treat school like your job.” When it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum-wage laws, however, students are forced to be students rather than workers.

Maria Montessori said that play was the work of the child, but it’s obvious, now, that we see school as their job.

I’m inspired by students who walk out on their jobs. Students like Greta Thunberg, who started school striking on Fridays, protesting her government’s inaction on climate change.

Last year she said that “a number of members of parliament have come out to the steps to express support for her position, although every one of them has said that she should really be at school. Her parents think so, too, she said—that she should really go to school.”

And yet:

Here’s a lighter, funnier story from legendary soul singer Jackie Shane about school as unpaid labor:

“I don’t like to be played… At school I was a fast runner. Ooh! Honestly, I’m not bragging, I could run. I just sort of leaped through the air. They asked me to run [in an inter-school competition]. I said, “How much does it pay?” They said, “Well, Jackie, this is your school.” I said, “No, no, no, no! I don’t own this school. If I’m going to perform, I want to be paid.” Everybody said, “Child you’re too much.” No, I found out early that you cannot be too much in this world. You can’t. It’s impossible. If you don’t get your gethers together, people will take advantage of you. I told them “What do you mean my school? I’m not getting a nickel. No, no, no, no honey, you’ve got to give Jackie some money.” All of that nonsense and patting me on the back and giving me a slice of pizza. Give me some money!”

The thief of playtime


Here is an I.W.W. “stickerette” produced in the 1910s, protesting the exploitation of children in textile mills.

I can’t help but think of it when my first grader complains about going to school:

“The day felt like a week!”

“I don’t get to think about what I want to think about!”

“It takes me away from my music!”

His protests aren’t that school is all that bad (he has a great teacher and a sunny classroom) but it’s just too long. 

It’s like Chris Rock said in Kill The Messenger: “There ain’t enough time when you got a career. When you got a job, there’s too much time.”

Here’s Jenny Odell (author of How To Do Nothing) on how she tries to slow down time for the students in her classes:

I can’t give my students more time in their lives; but what I try to do is change the way they think about and value it in the first place. My class typically includes students who aren’t art majors, some of whom may never have made art before. I give them the same advice every quarter: Leave yourself twice as much time as you think you need for a project, knowing that half of that may not look like “making” anything at all. There is no Soylent version of thought and reflection — creativity is unpredictable, and it simply takes time.

Emphasis mine. The first grader knows it already, and all too well… and it’ll only get worse!

A copy of a copy

Yesterday the 4-year-old brought his book of Coco sheet music into the studio and I copied a statue of Ernesto de la Cruz for him to color.

Today he came in and wanted to copy my copy. He had trouble starting, so I drew Ernesto’s head and torso, and he finished up his legs, arms, and guitar. I like our copy of the copy even more:

This happens a lot when I’m drawing solo: I’ll attempt a drawing of something from life, and then if I copy that drawing, simplifying the lines, I get something more reduced and interesting.

Now I’m wondering what a third step would look like. A copy of a copy of a copy…

Related: Copying is how we learn.

Thoreau’s laundry

“No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.“
—Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life 

“Thoreau” was trending on Twitter yesterday, not because anyone was actually reading him or grappling with his ideas, but because his “mom did his laundry” and “brought him sandwiches” at Walden.

There have been many takedowns of Thoreau and many defenses of him. (I recommend this essay and Laura Walls’ wonderful bio.) But “over the question of the laundry,” Rebecca Solnit wrote an attempt to “exonerate” him in 2013. (The essay, much like this blog post, was provoked by getting mad at something someone said on social media. It was published in Orion under the title “Mysteries of Thoreau, Unsolved.” Poke around a little online and you’ll find it. It’s funny and good.) The essay begins:

There is one writer in all literature whose laundry arrangements have been excoriated again and again, and it is not Virginia Woolf, who almost certainly never did her own washing, or James Baldwin, or the rest of the global pantheon. The laundry of the poets remains a closed topic, from the tubercular John Keats (blood-spotted handkerchiefs) to Pablo Neruda (lots of rumpled sheets). Only Henry David Thoreau has been tried in the popular imagination and found wanting for his cleaning arrangements, though the true nature of those arrangements are not so clear.

She goes on to list “a long parade of people who pretended to care who did Thoreau’s laundry as a way of not having to care about Thoreau,” even though it is unclear, even amongst Thoreau scholars, who actually did do Thoreau’s laundry.

Do we care who did the chores in any other creative household on earth? Did Dante ever take out the slops? Do we love housework that much? Or do we hate it that much? This fixation on the laundry is related to the larger question of whether artists should be good people as well as good artists, and probably the short answer is that everyone should be a good person, but a lot of artists were only good artists (and quite a lot more were only bad artists). Whether or not they were good people, the good artists gave us something.

“None of us is pure,” she writes, “and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to Puritans.”

Solnit points out that unlike other lit’ry men looking for a woman to look after them, Thoreau never married and “did little to make work for women.” In fact, though we obsess over his two years at Walden, Thoreau was an integral part of his household throughout his life, both supporting his family and gaining support from them. (Which is, you know, the whole damned point of a family.)

It’s also the case that the abolitionist women in Thoreau’s life did a whole lot of influencing on him. “The Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the whole nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”

“This,” Solnit writes, “is the washing that really mattered.”

I know how to write forever

“I know how to write forever. I don’t think I could have happily stayed here in the world if I did not have a way of thinking about it, which is what writing is for me. It’s control. Nobody tells me what to do. It’s mine, it’s free…”
—Toni Morrison

Back in Texas

cacti and texas sky
“Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it.”
—John Steinbeck

Our Lake Erie Sabbatical is officially over, and we’re back home in Austin, Texas, living just a few blocks south of where we first landed a dozen years ago.

t.s. Eliot four quartets
T.S. Eliot

I find it annoying how the older I get the more the clichés ring true. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. (Luckily, you can always turn around.)

We see every pattern except our own David shrigley
David Shrigley

I never gave this place the credit it probably deserved. People would say to me, “Oh, living in Austin, that must be so creatively inspiring!” And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know about that. It’s just a nice place to live.” But all my books and sons were born here, and the minute I got back, I started itching to get started on The Next Thing.

Jeffrey Gibson's Amazing Grace
Jeffrey Gibson, Amazing Grace

Every morning walk in the past two weeks has made me thankful for our return. We visited the Blanton this weekend, and this Jeffrey Gibson piece said it all for me. (I didn’t even look at the title. Every year has its theme.)

Good to be home.

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