Dinner Music #157: The weekly lineup
classic dinner music from Austin Kleon
This week we’re listening to some classic dinner music, along with some “computer world” albums, chosen by writer, author, mixtape-maker, interviewer and all-around prolific creative Austin Kleon. A few years ago, his wife found a box of melted 45s on the street in their neighborhood and since, I’ve been interested in the way that music shows up in Austin’s world. (It shows up a lot, in so many different ways, see the interview below!) There’s something a little bit anarchist about the way he approaches creativity by refusing to be or do one thing, which is often what people who are creative are told to do. Focus, specialize, concentrate. In a recent newsletter, he wrote a little bit about the Kuleshov effect, the idea in film that a viewer will get more meaning from two shots in sequence than a singular shot. We could take that idea, blow it up to to human life, and say that we derive deeper meaning by doing things that brush up against one another and, like poetry, create tension and forward movement by what Roland Barthes called “existential geology” in “Writing Degree Zero.”
Each poetic word is thus an unexpected object, a Pandora’s box from which fly out all the potentialities of language; it is therefore produced and consumed with a peculiar curiosity, a kind of sacred relish… [it is] the splendour and freshness of a dream language.
Or, to put it another way, in Austin’s words from an interview with Texas Monthly: “scumbags and lowlifes can create beautiful art.”
Check out his books here.
Enjoy.