Austin Kleon – Page 317

Suggested accompaniment: my 2017 playlist on shuffle play

Taking a walk every morning because the demons hate fresh air.
Driving the California coast from San Diego to San Francisco.
Going back to Italy. Walking around Milan and Turin to Cannonball Adderly’s Somethin’ Else.
Antigua, Guatemala.
Austin’s new central library. Walking there from my house through the greenbelt.
Watching the solar eclipse in the courtyard of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lake Michigan in the summer. The lookout at Arcadia. Sleeping Bear Dunes. The S.S. Badger.
Keeping a good old-fashioned diary. Holding my tongue and loosening my pen. Having a good place to have bad ideas. Taping guardian spirits inside the front cover. Re-reading.
Reading diaries. Thoreau, daily. Kafka. Kaethe Kollwitz. Andy Warhol. David Sedaris.
DJing a one-hour set for KUTX.
Getting more and more into to classical music. Taking my son to free concerts around town. Playing Schumann and Bach on piano. Listening to KMFA. Max Richter’s recomposed Four Seasons. Michael Torke’s saxophone quartet, “July.” Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirit. Stories about Beethoven. Drawing comics about Brahms.
Looking at the moon. Knowing what moon phase it is based on how shitty I feel. Using Sky Guide to find constellations. 100 Aspects of the Moon. The lunar Rashomon collage chapter in Lincoln In The Bardo. Mary Ruefle’s essay on poets and the moon in Madness, Rack, and Honey.
Thinking about seasons.
Glueing one thing to another. Finding the simplest cut.
Hannah Höch.
Lance Letscher.
Being lazy. Taking naps. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers. The song “Hallelujah, I’m A Bum!” Raymond Carver’s “Loafing.” Manifesto of the idle parent.
Buying a huge 4K TV at Costco for the bedroom and watching too much television. Binge-watching The Good Place, Halt and Catch Fire, Detectorists, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Catastrophe, and Grand Designs. Watching bad cable movies on the Roku channel.
Killing whole afternoons with 17776 and Universal Paperclips.
Going to Clark’s on a date with my wife and ordering affogato and then watching every other couple copy us.
Common Sense Media.
Listening to good podcast miniseries while working out, like Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect and Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing.
The digitized Corita Kent archives. Getting her GO SLO poster for Christmas.
Accepting that nobody knows what’s gonna happen and working without hope and without despair.
Chuck Berry (RIP) reciting Theodore Tilton’s poem, “Even This Shall Pass Away.”
Not waking up to the news. Not arguing with strangers on the internet. Staying out of the shitstream. Logging off. Not paying for wi-fi. (“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you.”)
Bill Withers on why he walked away the music business.
Library extension.
My paper dictionary.
An “organ donor” in our neighborhood giving us an old Hammond for the music room.
A neighbor giving my wife a whole case of ginger beer and drinking Moscow Mules all summer.
Saying I could read 10,000 words on Raffi, then finding Sheila Heti’s pro file. Listening to “Bananaphone” on repeat until slaphappy.
Perfume Genius’s “Queen” and No Shape.
Walt Whitman.
Lao Tzu.
X’s More Fun In The New World.
Gang of Four, Solid Gold.
Buying a Rolodex at Goodwill for $2.
Warren Craghead’s Trump drawings.
Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers.
Old George Carlin specials. Jammin’ in New York.
Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne.
Doing something that will outlast them.
Eating perfect chicken fingers on the beach in Grand Cayman.
$7 Tex-Mex lunch specials. City Of Gold. Molly Savage’s Costco food court painting. “The Case for Bad Coffee” and “In Praise of Ugly Food” from Best Food Writing 2016. Stories about Olive Garden.
Valentina’s Tex-Mex BBQ.
Sitting in a booth at Jim’s on 71.
The new Reese’s peanut butter cups with Reese’s Pieces in them.
Cup of Calm tea.
Eating clam chowder at the Legal Seafood bar in the Philadelphia airport.
Hong Ting’s “The Fisherman’s Song at Dusk.”
Denis Johnson (RIP) on homeschooling his kids.
My friend Laura, saying, “Take it year by year, kid by kid.”
Learning how to learn again. Making lists of what I want to learn. Studying something you love in depth.
Art with the kids. Drawing skeletons. Orchestrated drawings. Raising surrealists.
Getting permission from Nina Katchadourian’s show Curiouser at the Blanton.
Soul music. Sam & Dave’s “Soothe Me.” The Impressions’ “Keep On Pushin’.” D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Al Green doing “Here I Am” on Soul Train. Sam and Dave on German TV in 1967. James Gadson’s drumming for Bill Withers.
Bill Knott’s short poems. (And bonus poems.)
Jackie Shane’s motto, explained during her monologue on “Money,” on Any Other Way: “Do what you want, but know what you’re doing.”
Discovering Walter Murch and In The Blink of an Eye.
Watching old Val Lewton horror movies on Filmstruck.
Blogging every day since October 1st.
Paper.
Laura Walls’ biography of Thoreau.
Getting a new stereo and CD player. Discovering how amazing CDs sound after streaming for so many years.
Going to End of An Ear with my son and buying him Kraftwerk and LCD Soundsystem CDs.
David Rakoff’s Half Empty and his rant about Rent.
Tidying up here and there, but also embracing mess.
Slowing down.
The harp of Mary Lattimore. (And her Instagram.)
Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen really loud in the car. (Emotion and “Cut To The Feeling.”)
Books about exploring. Thoreau, again. John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic. Keri Smith’s The Wander Society. Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost.
Apocalyptic songs. William Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb.” (RIP.) Sonny and The Sunsets’ “Dark Corners.” Tubeway Army’s “Are Friends Electric?” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.”
Watching movies in the theater. Blade Runner 2049. Paterson. The Last Jedi. Baby Driver. Singin’ in the Rain.
Watching movies in bed. Get Out. The Handmaiden. The Lobster. Time Bandits. The Thin Man. My Man Godfrey. In Order of Disappearance. The Limey. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Christmas in Connecticut.
Re-watching old favorites. Moonstruck. Lebowski. Only Lovers Left Alive. The Apartment. Heat. Groundhog Day. It Happened One Night. Young Frankenstein. Coming To America. When Harry Met Sally. Magic Mike XXL. Royal Tenenbaums. Creed. John Wick!
Starting a fight club with my recycle bin.
Seeing coyotes and roadrunners on our morning walks. The legend of Steve.
The pilot at the Atlanta airport who went out of his way to show me an art installation.
Not telling people how it’s done. John Cage’s parable about not teaching.
Edna St. Vincent Millay reading “Recuerdo.”
James Patterson blurbing himself.
How Esther Pearl Watson paints her characters nude before adding clothes.
Tana Hoban’s books about signs and symbols.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s “You May Want To Marry My Husband.” (RIP) Her daughter Paris’s Instagram. Paying attention to what you pay attention to.
Seeing friends during SXSW and the Texas Book Festival.
Drawing comics on the iPad Pro.
Getting to read great books before they’re released. Alan Jacob’s How To Think. Tim Kreider’s I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.
Having a weekly library routine. Going to Miss Monica’s story times at the Hampton Branch at Oak Hill with the kids and hitting P. Terry’s after.
All the funny things my oldest son said. “Your skin keeps your bones from getting dirty!” At the pool: “She wouldn’t talk to me… She must not have any teeth!” At the playground, a kid told him that Jesus was dead, and he said, “So is Beethoven!” Playing him Ray Charles: “Papa, This is making me dance!” Referring to bowling as “pinball.” Seeing our monogrammed towels: “K is for Kraftwerk!” The time he called Leonard Bernstein “Bernie Einstein.” Shouting in frustration, “Who in the world made this stupid screwdriver?? It says ‘Made In China’ but it doesn’t say who made it!!!” The time he walked in on me watching Blade Runner, and he saw Deckard eating with chopsticks, and he said, “That guy is KNITTING HIS NOODLES!” Seeing snow: “I like how snow looks in real life!” The time I told him I thought he’d like marionettes, and he said, “Does she know a lot about bones?”
My two-year-old conducting Beethoven.
Silence. Sleeping with an eye mask and ear plugs.
Teaching myself, finally, to solder. Soldering broken toy electronics back together.
Recording songs on my old Tascam 4-track with my five-year-old, with titles like “Skeleton Girlfriend” and “I Don’t Want To Be Dead (Like Beethoven Is Dead)”
An epic 30-minute UNO game with my wife.
Drinking champagne on ice in a pint glass.
A bowl of cereal when you can’t sleep.
Getting up in the night to take a pee and looking out the bathroom window at the moonlit backyard.
Giving it five minutes. Changing my mind.
Reading books.

Previous years here.

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: