Austin Kleon

Kraftwerk in the studio


My 5-year-old’s favorite band is Kraftwerk, so we spend a ridiculous amount of time listening to their music. I downloaded a BBC Four documentary, “Kraftwerk: We Are The Robots,” for him to listen to on our walks, and when our local record store was out of stock of any Kraftwerk CDs he didn’t already own, we bought a used copy of Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, and Music.

I got really interested in Kling Klang — the private, secretive studio in Dusseldorf where they recorded my favorite records. Kraftwerk were really smart about taking any profits from their music and channeling them back into equipment and studio space so that they could remain independent. “We have invested in our machines, we have enough money to live, that’s it,” said Florian Schneider. “We can do what we want.”

But even though they could work whenever they wanted to, however they wanted to, this didn’t mean they weren’t disciplined. “We are not artists nor musicians,” said Ralf Hütter. “First of all we are workers.” Wolfgang Flür describes a typical working day:

In the Kling Klang studio of my time, we met up every evening around 7 or 8. Then we would watch mostly TV news. After, we drank mostly coffee or went for an ice cream at a nearby ice cream shop. Then we went to the next room, which I called the rehearsal room — the “Kling Klang.” And we made some Klang. Or Kling. It depended how we felt. Someone came up with a headline of a newspaper or maybe a TV report, then some melody was played around that theme. It developed over the following days, more and more. Lyrics came up, rhymes as well. And last, not least, a rhythm was drummed. That’s how it worked.

Again, they had all the time and space they wanted, so they could experiment. “We are playing the machines, the machines play us,” said Hütter. “We would improvise,” said Karl Bartos, “jamming together for two or three hours.” Each band member had his own little workstation, but sometimes they’d sit behind the console and just let the machines run. Later, they’d listen to the tapes, figure out which sections they like, then turn those sections into songs. Maxime Schmitt, one of their friends and collaborators, said it was a lot like working on a film, editing from rushes. And even though they often used more pro studios to mix their records, the recording all happened in Kling Klang.

Here’s the boy in our own little Kling Klang, listening to a mix:

Totally watching television

TV Poem by Ron Padgett

My favorite poem of the year is a toss-up between Lao Tzu or this Ron Padgett gem, from his Collected Poems. It’s unfashionable to admit it, but I do own a television, two of them, in fact: one is our old 40″ that lives in our living room, so my boys can watch Daniel Tiger or whatever and leave me and their mother alone for half an hour so we can actually accomplish a simple task like a shower or dinner or just staring into a coffee cup for five minutes, and the other TV is a gigantic 4K monster that I went out and bought at Costco on a whim. It lives in our bedroom, connected to a $5 antenna, and it is beloved. Last night we lied in bed with bourbon and watched My Man Godfrey and Rockford Files and Star Trek and fell asleep. It was heavenly and I am unashamed to admit it.

Two quick things about books

1) If you give the same book to 100 people, they’ll read 100 different books.

2) We’re constantly changing, rewiring, shedding our old cells, so if you re-read a book, it will be a different book from the one you read before.

Cosmic perspective


Jerry Seinfeld kept photos from the Hubble Space Telescope up on the wall in the Seinfeld writing room. “It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important,” he told Judd Apatow, in Sick in the Head. “You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it.” When Apatow said that sounded depressing, Seinfeld replied, “People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.”

This is one of the reasons I look at the moon.

Scraps


My sons draw all the time, but they don’t seem to care one bit about their drawings after they make them (I envy them), so they leave piles of finished and half-finished drawings everywhere. I go through them and find scraps of construction paper that I want to paste in my notebook. Sometimes I’ll make a collage out of them:


And sometimes I’ll actually use one of the drawings as a writing prompt, like this scribble of the digestive system Owen drew:


In a way, the page becomes a collaboration between us, even though I rarely ask their permission. See also: Orchestrated drawings.

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