Austin Kleon

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JOY DIVISION + CONTROL

Joy Division Documentary Mindmap

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Last night my wife said, “No more Joy Division. No more.”

This last week we watched both Anton Corbijn’s biopic Control and Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division. I’d recommend both if you’re a fan.

Some notes:

  • How essential Manchester was to the sound, and how much Joy Division’s music was rooted in place. One interviewee called their music “ambient noise” for the Manchester environment. Another said they took the landscape of Manchester and “made it cosmic.” Make it cosmic. That might be a good rule of thumb for writing about place…
  • Ian Curtis had a box of words that he’d bring to rehearsals, and when they needed lyrics, he would pull words out the box.
  • Remembered David Lynch talking about the myth of the suffering artist: in order to portray suffering, an artist doesn’t need to BE suffering, he just has to UNDERSTAND suffering. Suffering is often counterproductive to creativity. (Ian Curtis killed himself on the eve of their breakthrough US tour.)

Here’s my favorite performance — “Transmission” live on the BBC:

No language, just sound, is all we need know
To synchronize love to the beat of the show
And we could dance
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio

RECOMMENDATIONS

I don’t know what possessed me—I chronicle most of the stuff I’m reading / watching / looking at / listening to on my tumblelog and twitter and muxtape—but here’s a big bunch of stuff that I’ve dug in the past couple of months:

what it is by lynda barry

What It Is by Lynda Barry

What more can I say about this book?

It’s collage, it’s a writing textbook, it’s a memoir…it’s everything. It’s big. It’s hardcover. It’s awesome.
beach house devotion

Devotion music by Beach House

Quiet, soft, and beautiful. Lots of organ and reverb. Good hangover music.
and then there were none

And Then There Were None… by Agatha Christie

There was something magical about an island — the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world — an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.

Hmmm. A group of strangers stranded on a mysterious island, all with shady pasts that come back to haunt them…sound familiar?

My wife is an Agatha Christie nut. This was the first thing of hers I’ve ever read. 173 lightning fast pages. Fun read.
away from her

Away from Her a film by Sarah Polley

So sad, but so good. And the first time directing for Sarah Polley. She was quoted as saying the film was about

the opposite kind of love than we usually celebrate in films, which is new love without knowledge and without hardship.

It’s also a terrific example of how short stories fleshed out (as opposed to novels being compressed) make better films. (See also: In The Bedroom)

My favorite line (from the Alice Munro short story):

She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.
giant

Giant a film by George Stevens

PT Anderson was once asked to name 3 films that he loved but no one had ever heard of. He replied,

I like films that people HAVE heard of: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Giant, The Big Lebowski.

I recommend all three, too. Giant is a 3-hour epic set in West Texas. (Shot in Marfa.) James Dean. A gorgeous, young Elizabeth Taylor. What’s not to like?
knockemstiff by donald ray pollock

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

I first heard about this book last year when my parents sent me clips from their local newspapers.

This is the book I wanted to write as an undergrad: an updated Winesburg, Ohio set in the Southern part of the state. I grew up about 30 miles from the real Knockemstiff, but I never really belonged there, not the way Donald Ray Pollock belonged: he worked at the Mead paper plant in Chillicothe for 30 years before he started writing, and got his MFA at Ohio State. He knows his place and writes about it beautifully.

This is a strong first book — but it can tough to read all the dark stories (note: it’s full of sex, booze, foul language, and drug use) at once. I recommend spreading them out. Standout stories for me were “Real life” and “Discipline.”
no more heroes

No More Heroes a videogame by Suda51

This is a violent videogame for the Wii, in which you play a hipster assassin with a lightsaber. It’s basically a GTA ripoff, but the art is great, and the game is full of little side missions which really make it entertaining. A good buy for $30.
pilot g2 gel pens

PILOT G2 BOLD POINT GEL PEN

Holy crap these things are awesome. If you want to lay down a big fat line, these babies will do the trick. 1mm > .07mm.
some like it hot

Some Like It Hot A film by Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors: I especially love The Apartment, which also stars Jack Lemmon. And Marilyn Monroe is gorgeous, of course…
thoreau at walden by john porcellino

Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino

John Porcellino is definitely in my top 5 favorite cartoonists, and his simple, zen lines are perfect for adapting Thoreau into comics.
lykkeli-youthnovels

Youth Novel music by Lykke Li

I can’t really describe her music. I always play it when I’m walking to the bus…
dan in real life

Dan in Real Life a film by Peter Hedges

If Eddie Campbell says something is good, you know it’s good. This really surprised me. It’s a story about nice people who get into a genuine conflict. Probably why it didn’t get very good reviews: no explosions or incest or whatever…

Phew. That was too much work. I think I’ll save this kind of thing for the next year-end lists.

What stuff are y’all into right now?

BILL CALLAHAN AT THE MOHAWK 3.30.08

“Ever had one of those nights where you just couldn’t get drunk?”—Bill Callahan

No, I haven’t.

Bill Callahan at the Mohawk 3.30.08

We got to Bill Callahan‘s “secret” show with Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris (both from the band Shearwater) just in time to listen to them warm up during their soundcheck (and snap a picture through the window). Callahan is one of my favorite songwriters, so I was excited to see him again (we saw him a couple years ago in Cleveland).

sketch of jonathan meiburg

Jonathan Meiburg opened up with a round of songs on banjo and guitar. Then Callahan came out with Meiburg on guitar and Harris on drums.

bill callahan at the mohawk

sketch of drum kit

sketch of bill callahan at the mohawk

Great set. Harris and Meiburg gave the songs a heavy edge—much different than the Cleveland show with a fuller, subtler band (including the fantastic Jim White on drums!)

bill callahan at the mohawk

Setlist:

  • Sycamore
  • Nothing Rises to Meet Me
  • Our Anniversary
  • Diamond Dancer
  • Say Valley Maker
  • Rock Bottom Riser
  • Cold Blooded Old Times
  • Vessel In Vain
  • a new song about birds: “too many birds in one tree…“
  • Let Me See The Colts

Encore:

  • The Well
  • In The Pines

Here’s a four-minute Youtube reel of video clips I shot:

Links:

RE-IMAGINING FROM MEMORY

All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memories micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space

Something weird happens when we try to recreate cultural artifacts from memory: the result has less to do with the artifact, and more to do with us.

A year or two ago I got a Bonnie Raitt song stuck in my head. “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” I had the day off and I was bored, so I decided to sit down with my guitar and try to record the song from memory. I didn’t want to bother learning the lyrics or listen to the original. I just wanted to roll tape and see what happened.

On playback, it was the same song, but it wasn’t. The chords were “off,” and I’m pretty sure I left out a bridge. It’s like the filter of my memory took out the musical complexity and stripped it down to its bones. Left only a “cartoon” of the song…

dirty projectors rise above

Here’s the story behind the amazing Dirty Projectors album, Rise Above:

[Dirty Projectors man man Dave] Longstreth went to help his parents move out of the house he grew up in. Among his youthful artifacts was the cassette case from the Black Flag album Damaged. This brought back all sorts of memories— Black Flag was one of Longstreth’s first loves— but the tape itself was missing. So, like the character in the Jorge Luis Borges story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ who sets out to recreate Don Quixote line by line from memory, Longstreth went to the nearest Guitar Center, purchased the cheapest cassette four-track he could find, and embarked on recasting Damaged from memory, without re-listening to a single note or reading any lyrics. The ten songs that make up Rise Above (titled after one of the tracks on Damaged) stem from these four-track demos, recorded at his parents’ house on an acoustic guitar.

“I had to completely inhabit my early adolescence, the time when I used to listen to Damaged,” Longstreth has said. “[I was] trying to access the memory crystals stored from when I loved it back in middle school.”

The beauty of Rise Above is that Longstreth used his memory of the original Black Flag songs as a starting point to create “new” songs. “I wanted to see if I could make this album…not as an album of covers or an homage per se, but as an original creative act.” It was his imagination that made them great.

It frees us to have constraints. I’m starting to believe that the idea that the artist can should sit down and create something “new” is a paralyzing delusion. We can only create a collage of our influences, our memories—filtered through our imagination.

By re-interpreting these artifacts, we come up with something that is uniquely our own.

Ivan Brunetti has a drawing exercise (link long dead — try his excellent book, Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice) where he has his students doodle cartoon characters quickly, from memory:

When drawing characters quickly, from memory, one can be quite inaccurate, almost as if one is inventing new characters, and these “mistakes” can serve as the basis for new character designs. This lets the students see their own styles more clearly. A page full of these doodles can help the student discern certain qualities that are consistent within their set of drawings. These qualities are a clue as to what makes one’s particular “visual handwriting” different or unique, and these should be embraced by the student.

The idea that by drawing from memory “copies” of other work, we can somehow sharpen our own sense of what makes us unique! I love it.

Links:

MUSICOPHILIA BY OLIVER SACKS

MUSICOPHILIA BY OLIVER SACKS

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

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