Hey y’all,

Let’s get right to it:

1. I had a ton of fun over the past couple of weeks making a big batch of bonus goodies for folks who pre-order my next book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. All you have to do to get them is pre-order the book wherever you like to buy books…
   
   

   Pre-order the book now

   …then take a photo or screenshot of your receipt and fill out the form on this page. You will immediately be able to download a printable PDF that includes:
   - A personal note from me
   - 5 mini posters
   - 5 zines with bonus material

   - 1 playlist of all the musicians mentioned in the book, plus a J-card if you’re feeling inspired to make your own mix on cassette!
   
   

   Get your pre-order goodies

   Pre-ordering the book not only gets you these exclusive goodies, it’s the best way to support my work right now. Pre-ordering lets bookstores and retailers know they should be stocking the book and helps boost the numbers in the first week of sales to increase the chances of it hitting the bestseller lists.
   
   Publishers Weekly published our first review this week and said the book’s “cheery, upbeat lessons” are “full of fun, wryly witty wisdom.” If you like my other books, you will love this one!
   
   

   Pre-order!

   
   

2. I spent all Wednesday in a studio in Austin, Texas recording the audiobook:
   

   

   Quite the step up from recording The Steal Like An Artist Audio Trilogy in my closet during the pandemic, but man, I forgot how physically and mentally demanding it is! During our lunch break, I played the engineer clips of Winnebago Man to re-enact what was going on in my head all day. (PS. You can buy Don’t Call It Art in any format — hardcover, ebook, or audiobook — and still be eligible for the pre-order goodies!)
   
   

3. I’m in that weird place called “the gulp” —  the thing is finished and it’s no longer in your hands, but it’s not in anybody else’s hands yet, either. This can be a dangerous time for the psyche of a creative person. My favorite example is Paul McCartney, who thought that Revolver was out of tune and the other Beatles had to assure him that it was just fine. (The Walter Martin Show has infected me with Beatlemania.)
   
   

4. “Never look at the audience. Look over their heads, look somewhere else, look into the darkness…” Advice from Steve Martin.
   
   

5. I enjoyed this story of Bob Dylan, one of the greatest thieves in musical history, being sore at John Lennon, another brilliant thief, for stealing from him. I chased it with Anthony Lane’s “How Bad is Plagiarism, Really?”
   
   “We have a word, in English, for self-plagiarizing so habitual, and so fruitfully evergreen, that it becomes the mark—the smack, if you will—by which an artist is recognized and loved. We call it style.”
   
   Lane’s ending made me chuckle, because, intentionally or not, he’s lifting from Alfred Hitchcock, who said, “Self-plagiarism is style.” (Steal like an artist.)
   
   

6. “An idea arises spontaneously, just like any other thought… a concept is built deliberately through a series of choices and constraints.” Penny Lane on ideas vs. concepts.
   
   

7. VHS/90s nostalgia: When I got chicken pox in the fourth grade, I spent a week on the couch watching a VHS tape dubbed with a double feature of Wayne’s World and Edward Scissorhands. (The former was a pizza night hit — it really holds up.) My gaming fifth grader is really into VHS — my mom actually mailed him her VCR — so I’m curious whether he would like Retro Rewind, a game where you work in a video store. (Criterion just ran an interview with Alex Ross Perry, who directed an essay film about the rise of VHS, Videoheaven.)
   
   

8. Map reading: the cartography of literature and Saul Steinberg. (This photo of Steinberg with his six-year-old self is mentioned in the back of Don’t Call It Art. I thought of it when I saw this gallery of fathers and sons holding hands.)
   
   

9. RIP drummer James Gadson. One of my favorite things is him grooving behind Bill Withers singing “Use Me” on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972.
   
   

10. Lifting my spirits: pictures of Earth from Artemis’s moon flyby, this baby beaver rescued in Austin, and Athena’s new owlet.
    

Thanks for reading! This hand-rolled, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you.

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

I had a musical Easter weekend. We watched Wayne’s World for pizza night on Friday, my band practiced for 4 hours on Saturday, and I spent most of Sunday afternoon making a new mixtape:

April is often a melancholy month for me. Last April I made an “April Showers” mix that I described as a “sad dad bad had” mix for spring with a bunch of country weepers and other stuff I like. This month, I got to thinking about Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” and wondered if I could do a frozen version of “April Showers” with a bunch of wintry-ish music that might still sound good in spring. (If you’d rather listen to something more upbeat, check out last month’s mixtape.)

A new challenge: a reader sent me a big box full of sealed, blank C90 cassettes, so now I’m faced with filling 90+ minutes of tape. (As I mentioned last month, many 90-minute cassettes are actually more like 94-minute cassettes, because the manufacturers added a few extra minutes of tape to each side.) So this mix is something like 1 hour and 34 minutes long, with a few long tracks on side two:

The Sufjan Stevens track started off a mix of music we played at our wedding almost 20 years ago. I was going to follow it with another song from the wedding mix, Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost,” but NASA’s Artemis II mission influenced me, and I chose “This is How We Walk on the Moon” instead. (I thought “Ashes To Ashes” would sound good after it, somehow forgetting that Bowie calls back to “Major Tom” in that song!) The things that look like moons on the cover are actually coins from a headdress in National Geographic:

You can listen to “Snow in April” on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

* * *

It turns out our tweens aren’t too old for an egg hunt, so we got out the plastic easter eggs for at least one more year and hid them around the yard.

I can’t pull out Easter eggs without thinking about the other kind of Easter egg — the hidden feature or message. I don’t think everybody knows this, but I hide two Easter eggs in almost every one of my Friday newsletters…

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Hey y’all,

Putting down my Rubik’s Cube to type. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. “Thoreau was saying: if you’re beginning to die within, take measures right now. There must be some cabin in the woods1 within you. There must be some space where you can regenerate yourself and remember what is most essential to you.” That’s writer Pico Iyer, a talking head in the Ken Burns-produced PBS documentary Henry David Thoreau. Other talking heads include Michael Pollan (“[Thoreau’s] big project as a writer is to wake us up”), Rebecca Solnit (she has the best response to the “But his mom did his laundry!” fun bunch choir), and Laura Walls, who wrote the wonderful biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life. I fell asleep several times, but my kids made it through all 3 nights of one-hour episodes! Our only trouble was that the ending was so heavy-handed we all went to bed depressed. (I’m going to get through Walden some day, but what I really love are his journals.)
   
   

2. Lighter fare: the teenager and I went to see Project Hail Mary, a good ol’ popcorn movie. Ryan Gosling says his performance was inspired by Chaplin in Modern Times and Val Kilmer and his t-shirt game in Real Genius, so I added both of them to our pizza night queue. (We liked The Martian a while back, another adaptation of a novel by Andy Weir. The teenager read both.) Funny thing: when I was signing at BookPeople the other day, Isabel told me that nobody wants to buy books with movie tie-in covers — they want to be seen reading the original!
   
   

3. Ryan Holiday’s 5 years of lessons from running a bookstore.
   
   

4. I know a bunch of people with new books out: My blurbs are on the back of Mason Currey’s Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life and Grace Farris’s See One, Do One, Teach One: The Art of Becoming a Doctor (she’s at BookPeople next week), and I was in the first draft of Jenny Lawson’s How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, but I think I got cut, LOL. (She’s at BookPeople later this month).
   
   

5. Zine-lovers of Austin, TX: This weekend is Staple! The Independent Media Expo. The special guest is Tara Booth, whose book Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It was one of my favorite things I read last year.
   
   Music-lovers of Austin, TX: On April 22, I’m interviewing Hrishikesh Hirway (host of my favorite podcast Song Exploder) onstage as part of the release show for his new album. You can get tickets here.

   

   
   

6. A message I co-sign: “Start a band, even if you’re terrible.” At the beginning of the year, I started playing bass in a 90s rock cover band with a couple of other dad friends. We played our first show in our local park last Sunday, and somehow, we weren’t terrible! It was fun. I always played guitar in bands when I was a teenager, but I love playing bass in a trio: you’re in this great spot between rhythm and melody.

   

   Speaking of bass players: Dusty Henry’s thoughts about Flea made me think of the recent NYTimes profile of Minutemen bassist Mike Watt. Both bassists are haunted (and animated) by the death of a friend and bandmate who brought them to their music: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ founding guitarist Hillel Slovak and Minutemen leader D. Boon, respectively. (Flea’s monologue in The Other F Word is cited in the back of my next book, Don’t Call It Art.)
   
   

7. Incredible deal: you can get PDFs of The Collected Peanuts for $25.
   
   

8. “One principle of collage, for me, is you have to kill one thing to make another. It’s a small-scale model of revolutionary behavior.” Lucy Sante on collage.
   
   

9. RIP cartoonist Glen Baxter, who I will add to my list of creative people who stutter: “An autodidactic spirit was fostered by his stammer. It made him dwell upon words, and their substitutes, and this would inform his captions’ idiosyncratic vocabulary. As he recalled, ’you can’t ask the grocer “Can I have some oranges?“ because you’re going to immediately hit the word c-c-can, so you say, “Good morning, have you any oranges?” Of course the shop’s full of oranges — who is this idiot? — so you’re in the position of being slightly mad and also there’s this fear involved. This childhood fear means I tinker with sentences until I’ve got them just about right.” (You can see more of Baxter’s work on Instagram.)
   
   

10. I will give the last word to Wendell Berry: “Every day do something that won’t compute.”
    
    

    And Elmore Leonard: “Really all you have to do is be yourself. Be cool.”

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. Next week I record my second audiobook! This one is for Don’t Call It Art. Also, next Friday I’ll have some fun goodies for people who’ve pre-ordered the book, so save your receipts!!!

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Hey y’all,

I’ve been teaching my teenager how to solve a 3x3 Rubik’s Cube, layer by layer. Once we got to the third layer, I realized I solve it pretty much by muscle memory, so I had to refer to my notes:

What surprised me looking up these notes wasn’t the notes themselves, but where they were in my diary. The date: February 1, 2020.

The narrative I’d been telling myself for years was that solving a Rubik’s Cube was one of the hobbies I picked up during the pandemic. But actually, I started learning to solve the cube on the last day of January, a whole month before the pandemic began.

I started flipping back through my diary to try to figure out what else was going on in my life at the time. And then it hit me: my friend Jason Polan died on January 27th, 2020.

So, the real story is this: I got one of my sons a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas in 2019. A month later, I needed a little grief processor, something to solve, something to do with my hands. I picked up the cube. A month after that, the whole world went into grief mode, and the cube became even more handy.

When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction. When so many things seem unfixable, fixing something feels amazing.

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

Solving the Rubik’s Cube was a little bit like fixing doorknobs. I missed the whole craze in the 80s, so I was completely new to it. After watching an online tutorial, I discovered that there are step-by-step systems you can apply to solving it. You can actually attack it like a programmer with code: You basically look at the cube and run if/then statements in your head to find the right algorithm to apply. After the first dozen solves, I felt like I was replacing doorknobs again, except there were as many doorknobs as I wanted!

We’re wired to want to turn chaos into order. Randomness into meaning.

There’s something about keeping your hands busy when your brain feels broken. I have friends with depression who build elaborate LEGO sets. I’ve read about veterans with PTSD who put together gigantic jigsaw puzzles.

After I learned to solve the cube, I started seeing how fast I could solve it. I was partially inspired by the 40-minute Netflix documentary, The Speed Cubers, which I just re-watched with the kids. But I quickly grew tired of speed as a measurement. (For fun, the teenager timed me when we were sitting around yesterday, and I solved the cube in something like a minute and a half. The world record is around 3 seconds.)

Once I gave up on speed, I had a big “Now What?” moment. The fun, of course, was the challenge of learning to solve the cube. Once I figured it out, it wasn’t so fun or engaging anymore.

I see in my experience with the cube a little half-baked metaphor for creative work, which I attempted to explain to Tim Bogatz and Pixel Labs when they were filming me in my studio for The Art of Education conference. I posted a shorter clip online, but here’s the whole outtake, uncut:

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Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I don’t know how or when it happened, but I’ve somehow become a person who likes being in the desert? It started a few years ago driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, then developed on trips to Joshua Tree and New Mexico. Last week for spring break we took a little 3-night trip to Arizoña (I pronounce it like Matt Berry), hiked in a canyon outside of Sedona, stargazed under dark skies, looked at the sun through a solar telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, and caught a Cleveland Guardians spring training game at Goodyear Ballpark in Phoenix. (The most fun I’ve ever had at a baseball game. Highly recommended.)
   
   

2. Upon our return, we all watched the original Bad News Bears for the first time. A pizza night hit. (Baseball! “It is designed to break your heart. It begins in the spring, when everything else begins again…”)
   
   

3. A friend found out I was reading Edward Abbey’s classic Desert Solitaire on the trip and asked me what I thought. I texted back, “If it weren’t for Abbey’s sense of humor, it would be intolerable. With it, it’s just right.” Then I remembered I actually quote from the book in Don’t Call It Art, using Abbey’s words to describe my days with the kids when they were little: “Time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood. There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing…”
   
   

4. Meg and I had planned to listen to Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs as our road trip soundtrack, but then our oldest suggested the Stardew Valley score, and it was… kind of perfect? (I am very tempted to get it on vinyl!)
   
   

5. Maybe it was the time out in the desert, but I felt compelled on Tuesday to write about introspection.
   
   

6. Fun With Your Typewriter, a 1956 book I found via an Instagram post that friend of the newsletter Kelli Anderson sent me. (Speaking of: two years ago, I inadvertently started my typewriter interview series with the legendary poet Mary Ruefle.)

   
   

7. Random thing in our house that gives me joy: this bug catcher we bought to catch, inspect, and release bugs.
   
   

8. “My first job downstairs is to open the back door and get a big breath of fresh air – rain or shine, winter or summer – I just copy the cats and dog, that’s what they do – that’s how the ‘read’ the day, nose up, what’s in the air? What smells different? Clear out the night-lungs. Start again.” Jeanette Winterson on the spring equinox, the real start of the year.
   
   

9. RIP writer Tracy Kidder. I bought The Soul of a New Machine for my teenage coder, but I think I’ll steal it back and give it a read myself. (A quote from that book about engineers makes me think of artists, too: “Part of the fascination… is just little boys who never grew up, playing with Erector sets. Engineers just don’t lose that, and if you do lose it, you just can’t be an engineer anymore.” So many creative people are just kids who didn’t stop.)
   
   

10. This is the last weekend to take advantage of my spring 20% off sale on paid subscriptions! A paid subscription supports my work, keeps Friday free for everybody, and gets you access to a special letter every Tuesday, the nicest comment section on the internet, and the full newsletter archives.
    
    

    Get 20% off for 1 year

    
    A sampling of the kind of letters you’ll unlock with a paid subscription: looks inside my notebooks; printable zines; tutorials on block printing, making collages, playing exquisite corpse, how I dive deep into a new subject, how I read the internet, and much, much more…
    

Thanks for reading!

xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

Today’s Tuesday Trio — one book, one record, and one movie recommendation — is on the theme of introspection.

Please feel free to send me your own recommendations related to introspection in the comments!

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📖 The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1595)

Humans say all kinds of stupid things every minute of the day, but people hold microphones up to the lips of billionaires and we have to suffer their amplified stupidity.

“If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective,” said tech billionaire Marc Andreessen on a podcast, claiming he practices “zero” levels of introspection. “Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff.”

History would like a word. I don’t recommend books as correctives (as G.C. Lichtenberg wrote, “A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out”) but for you, my dearest readers, I’d like to recommend this 431-year-old book of essays written by Michel de Montaigne.

“I myself am the subject of my book,” Montaigne wrote. I’ve spent literally years breaking bread with his man up in his tower writing down his innermost thoughts. Reading about 10 pages a day, I just finished the last of the 1,269 pages this week. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do now without my morning Montaigne to keep me off of my phone. (I highly recommend M.A. Screech’s translation. For just a little sampler, try the slim volume On Solitude.)

Montaigne wrote about so many topics — his weird upbringing, his cat, his kidney stones — but he wrote often about kings and princes and other rich, lofty people and how much he wouldn’t care to be one. “The most beautiful of lives to my liking are those which conform to the common measure,” he wrote, “human and ordinate, without miracles though and without rapture.”

And besides, “Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.”

💿 John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band (1970)

Ian Leslie, author of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, suggested in “Against Introspection,” that perhaps, even though most of what Andreessen says is “silly,” he may be “on to something.”  

I’m often struck by how many high achievers are unencumbered by self-reflection. To take an example close to home, I’ve read or watched countless interviews with Paul McCartney, and he is at his least interesting on the topic of Paul McCartney. It isn’t that he doesn’t have a rich inner life. It’s that he puts it into his work - into the songs. His therapist is his guitar.

This is something Walter Martin and I tried to get into in our conversation about Paul McCartney. You never really seem to know who McCartney is because you’re not even sure if he knows himself. (Answer: He’s a musician, man!)

On the other hand, you have his partner John Lennon, who seemed like he was trying to pull out his guts and twist them into songs. Earlier exhibits are Beatles songs like “Help!” or “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but nothing is as raw as Plastic Ono Band, his first post-Beatles record which came out of his experiences with primal scream. These therapy sessions were conducted by Arthur Janov, who said of Lennon at the time, “This was someone the whole world adored, and it didn't change a thing. At the center of all that fame and wealth and adulation was just a lonely little kid.” 

The artwork is a key feature of this record. I was a teenager when I got the CD of Plastic Ono Band. The front cover is clearly labeled with Lennon’s name and the title, and the back cover is a plain green background with the track listing. I probably listened to the album for a whole decade before I got my hands on the LP, which not only doesn’t have Lennon’s name or the title on the front cover, it features nothing on the back cover but a picture of Lennon as a little boy:

“Look at me / who am I supposed to be?” Lennon sings. Plastic Ono Band is the sound of one of the richest and most famous people alive trying to figure it out.

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Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. Today is the first day of spring in the Northern hemisphere! To celebrate, I’m throwing a 20% off sale on paid subscriptions.
   

   
   A paid subscription supports my work, keeps Friday free for everybody, and gets you access to a special letter every Tuesday, the nicest comment section on the internet, and the full newsletter archives.
   
   

   Get 20% off for 1 year

   
   

2. Art in Austin, TX: This is the last weekend for a very fun show at Northern-Southern: Brian Dulaney’s Deck of Many Things is made of 120 baseball card-sized mini-prints. There’s an artist talk and closing reception this Sunday, March 22 at 4PM. (You can see more of his work on Instagram.) I had a nice chat with gallery owner Phillip Niemeyer, who thinks the art scene in the city right now is as good as it's ever been. He tipped me off to the Friends Fair happening May 7-9, which will take over the second floor of the Loren hotel.
   
   

3. Documentaries: Our houseguests who went to SXSW Film told me to keep my eye out for Cookie Queens, a documentary about Girl Scout Cookie season, and #Skyking, about an airline worker who stole a plane. I also want to see Beyond The Duplex Planet, a film about artist David Greenberger, who in 1979 started publishing interviews with senior citizens in his zine, Duplex Planet. (He’s now a senior himself!)
   
   

4. Oscars: I think I only saw two of the winners this year: One Battle After Another and KPop Demon Hunters. (Both were great!) It’s weird how I watch a movie every Friday night with the kids — at least 52 movies a year! — but how out of it I can be when it comes to new releases. (I really want to see EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert while it’s still in theaters.)
   
   

5. Spring mixtape: I got one side of a cassette perfectly filled with no gaps… and the tape broke. So I had to pivot to a blank C90 cassette. Then I (re)discovered that many 90-minute cassettes are actually more like 95-minute cassettes, because the manufacturers added a few extra minutes to each side. So this half-finished mixtape — one side of the cassette — is 47 minutes and 17 seconds long. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube:

   

6. ”[The song] is like a magic box. Take the lid off and inside you can glimpse the whole history of twentieth century music.” Ian Leslie on The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.” (For more Beatlemania: McCartney’s creativity in 3 photographs.)
   
   

7. The folks at Standard Ebooks just dropped a free version of one of my all-time favorite books, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.
   
   

8. “When a book designer writes a book, who designs the cover?” Designer Oliver Munday on his first work of fiction, Head of Household.
   
   

9. From the BBC Archives: artist Tony Hart draws Stonehenge using chalk pastels and a marker. (If you like that, here’s another.)
   
   

10. Maybe the wildest entry in the typewriter interview series so far: 10 questions for cartoonist Marc Bell.

Thanks for reading! This hand-rolled publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

Get 20% off for 1 year

xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

Marc Bell is a Canadian cartoonist and the author of Raw Sewage Science Fiction, a gorgeous book of comics and art published by one of my favorite publishers, Drawn & Quarterly. This interview was half-way conducted via the USPS: Marc held the questions hostage for a long time before turning them into these wild collages that he scanned and emailed to me. Enjoy these works of art! 

Big thanks to Marc for being the 17th participant in this series of typewriter interviews.

If you liked these collages, you will love Marc’s Instagram and his book Raw Sewage Science Fiction.

xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. As I mentioned last week, spring has sprung in Austin, Texas. The bluebonnets are starting to pop! Maybe it’s not superbloom in Death Valley levels of excitement, but it’s my favorite time of year, and I try to savor it all I can. Central Texas is not “grand” — a place like this teaches you to really pay attention, track the subtle changes around you, and fire up your eyebeams to search for beauty.
   
   

2. Austin writer Christopher Brown published a spring dispatch that I think conveys some of the cognitive/spiritual dissonance you experience when you’re trying to process so much beauty and tragedy at the same time. (See item #4 in my letter “Leaving a paper trail” for an interesting encounter I had with Brown’s book A Natural History of Empty Lots.)
   
   

3. “I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ’The Beatles did.’” — Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
   
   Listen: I had an absolute blast on Walter Martin Radio Hour talking about Paul McCartney. So much so that I followed it up with 2,000 words about McCartney’s creativity in 3 photographs.

   

4. Speaking of musicians with podcasts I love: On April 22, in Austin, Texas, I’m interviewing Hrishikesh Hirway onstage as part of the release show for his new album. You can get tickets here. Hrishi is also playing several SXSW shows and dates in other cities. (Interviewing such a good interviewer is going to require no small amount preparation on my part!)

   
   

5. I’m not doing anything official at SXSW, but I will be riding my bike around quite a bit. I have a few pieces of advice for visitors:
   
   - Check out individual book stores and record stores for free events. First Light Books, for example, is hosting keynote speaker Tom Sachs tonight. End of an Ear — my favorite record store in town — is hosting a short reading and signing by Damon Krukowski next week. A new little shop downtown is TOMO mags — they’re hosting an Attensity! event and a full day event called Analog: Future Front.
   
   - Old reliables: KUTX and the Flatstock poster show.
   
   - Our local chains are good, actually. If you don’t want to wait in line, just get a taco from TacoDeli, a burger from P. Terry’s, or a juice from Juiceland. (Great record shopping at all Juicelands, actually, courtesy @explodedrecords aka Soundfounder.)

   
   - Go see Thor Harris! He plays all over the place and is probably the most interesting/sweetest human who hasn’t left Austin.
   
   I put some other Austin/SXSW tips at the end of my previous letter, “South by Southwest.”
   
   

6. The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College received 76 works of art from The Saul Steinberg Foundation.
   
   

7. Meg and I got food poisoning last weekend, so I recreated a moment from my youth when I got chicken pox in the fourth grade and watched Wayne’s World on VHS over and over again. It holds up, big time. I love at least two of director Penelope Spheeris’s other movies: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (which you can think of as a prequel to Wayne’s World) and The Little Rascals (big pizza night hit).
   
   

8. I really didn’t have becoming a huge Sherlock Holmes nerd in my mid-life plans, but here we are. I’m reading the ninth and final book, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, and also dipping into The Daily Sherlock Holmes, which was co-edited by my friend Levi Stahl and has a really lovely foreword by Michael Sims, who wrote a book about Conan Doyle and the creation of Holmes, Arthur and Sherlock.
   
   

9. Perhaps it was the state of my brain-gut connection, but the funniest thing I saw all week was Redman’s 2001 appearance on MTV Cribs. (I also found myself watching Jackass clips and laughing like Beavis and Butt-Head. Nostalgia is a helluva drug!)

   
   

10. I just approved the final pass of Don’t Call It Art, which means it’s ready to go to the printer. Now I attempt something I’ve never done before: re-formatting the illustrations in a square book so they look bigger and better on a rectangular, portrait mode e-reader screen. (My books are [painstakingly] designed to be read in print, but I know people have their reasons for ebooks!) Wish me luck…

    

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Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

This letter is brought to you by side two of Abbey Road at full volume.

Something some of you may not know about me is that I’ve been a bit of a Beatles freak since I was in middle school. Here, I have mapped the cycle of my Beatles fandom:

There really is no in between for me. I’m either all in, or all out, which is why any new Beatles book, any new Beatles movie, any new Beatles anything has the ability to send me down the Beatles hole.

The highlight of last week — maybe the highlight of my whole year so far — was being a special guest to kickoff Beatles season on The Walter Martin Radio Show. Walter and I both grew up Lennon worshippers, so we got together to talk about our mixed feelings of admiration and bewilderment concerning Mr. McCartney and Morgan Neville’s new documentary, Man on the Run.

You can listen to our whole hour-long conversation here.

I love doing podcasts and radio interviews, but I’m such a visual guy that sometimes I miss having my little props and pictures, so I thought for the rest of this letter I would augment our conversation with 3 of my favorite pictures of Paul McCartney, that present him in 3 different stages of his creative development.

1. This is a photo taken by Mike McCartney, Paul’s younger brother, of Paul McCartney and John Lennon writing “I Saw Her Standing There” in 1962.

Josh Shenk wrote about the photo in Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs:

One late November afternoon in 1962, John Lennon and Paul McCartney got together to write at Paul’s house at 20 Forthlin Road in Liverpool. Their ritual was to come around in the afternoon, just the two of them, when Paul’s dad was at work. They would go to the small front room overlooking Jim McCartney’s patch of garden and sit opposite each other. “Like mirrors,” Paul said.

John sat on a chair pulled in from the dining room. He had his Jumbo Gibson acoustic-electric with a sunburst finish. Paul sat on a little table in front of the telly with his foot on the hearth of the coal fireplace. He played a Spanish-style guitar with nylon strings, strung in reverse for a lefty. In a photography shot by Paul’s brother, Michael, they’re both looking down at a notebook on the floor, filled with lyrics…

…Years later, Paul told his brother that he loved his photo of the “I Saw Her Standing There” writing session because it captured how it really was—”the Rodgers and Hammerstein of pop at work.” Writing “eyeball to eyeball,” as John said, they weren’t just frontmen for a rock group; they were composers working in concert.

Lennon and McCartney were best friends and musical partners who met as teenagers, were formed, and found their great gifts together. You can’t really think about one without the other.

2. This photograph of the Beatles in the studio is part of the booklet that comes with the 50th anniversary CD edition of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here’s a clearer picture (I can’t find a photo credit in the booklet or online):

The other Beatles are all at their posts. George at the organ. John in front of an amp. Ringo drumming. But there’s Paul, up on his feet moving a microphone. Why isn’t an engineer doing it for him?

In engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording The Beatles, he writes about all the strict rules and restrictions of the recording studio in that era. (When the Beatles first started out, the engineers were still wearing lab coats.) They broke all sorts of rules and protocol for the albums leading up to Pepper’s, and, clearly, the rules had mostly been thrown out the window at this point. Emerick writes that Paul was the most curious of the crew about the recording process. He wanted to get hands-on, which is what he’s doing in this photo: He’s not waiting for some engineer to fix the sound.

Paul would also stay at the studio late after the other band members had gone home to overdub his bass lines one section at a time, getting them as perfect as he could. “There were nights when he would labor until dawn,” Emerick writes, “keeping at it until his fingers were literally bleeding.”

Ian Leslie, in his book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs describes the different ways Lennon and McCartney brought material to their bandmates:

John was more likely to take partially worked-out songs to Paul and the others, and then flesh them out in collaboration. His ideas were platforms for the creativity of the group. McCartney’s ideas tended to be more fully formed, which left less scope for Lennon and the others. He had the ability to hear a song—melody and counterpoint, key changes and instrumentation—in his head, like an aural hallucination, together with a clear idea of how to make it real in the studio. Paul was also an instrumental all-rounder and the most accomplished musician in the group.

Paul was trying to get a sound that he heard in his head, so he rode the other Beatles really hard. He could go too far, trying to get a sound, driving the other Beatles crazy on tracks like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” which, by the way, gets the funniest epitaph from Ian MacDonald in Revolution in The Head:

If any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up, it is MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER. Compulsively fertile in melody and fascinated by music’s formal beauties, McCartney could, when unrestrained by Lennon’s cynicism, fatally neglect meaning and expression. This ghastly miscalculation - of which there are countless equivalents on his garrulous sequence of solo albums - represents by far his worst lapse of taste under the auspices of The Beatles.

3. Here is a photo taken by Linda McCartney of Paul recording drum overdubs in a bathroom for McCartney II in 1980. This is a man who is playing. He’s on his own, doing it all himself. There’s no John or George around to roll eyes at him. He is not worried about being a goofball. He’s not worried about going overboard. (And he does. Exhibit A: “Temporary Secretary.”)

In a recent Fresh Air interview, Morgan Neville said:

I mean, he puts out 10 records in 10 years. But on top of that, he's doing all kinds of side projects. I mean, he is somebody who needs to be doing something. I asked him about it. You know, I said, are you a workaholic? And what he said to me is, well, you don't work music, you play it. So I think I'm a playaholic. And I think that's true. I mean, to this day - Paul McCartney's probably making music today, you know, and every day. I mean, that's what he still does, 'cause that's that's how he expresses himself. And I get that. You know, if I was Paul McCartney, I'd make music every day, too.

Music, for McCartney, seems to be compulsive. It’s what he does. It’s when he is whoever and whatever he is.

Maybe the thing I’m most fascinated by about Paul McCartney is his insistence that he doesn’t really know where the music comes from. Years ago, I clipped this paragraph from a 2016 interview (and wound up using it in the first chapter of Don’t Call It Art):

You’ve never got it down. It’s this fluid thing, music. I kind of like that. I wouldn’t like to be blasé or think, ‘Oh you know I know how to do this.’ In fact I teach a class at a the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — I do a little songwriting class with the students — and nearly always the first thing I go in and say [is], ‘I don’t know how to do this. You would think I do, but it’s not one of these things you ever know how to do.

John Higgs expands on this in his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche:

After sixty years of interviews, it’s clear that McCartney does not understand why music comes so naturally to him, or flows out of him so easily, in a way that doesn’t happen to other people. He seems at times afraid that it might stop – he has never learned how to read music, for example, in case it breaks the way he works. As the Irish poet Paul Muldoon has said when discussing McCartney’s creativity, ‘It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.’

Another thing I admire is that McCartney doesn’t torture himself too much with his songwriting process. More from Love and Let Die:

McCartney places great emphasis on starting and finishing work immediately, before you have had the chance to overanalyse or come up with an excuse not to do it. This is an attitude that he credits his father with instilling in him. Whenever Paul or his brother Mike would try to get out of a chore by saying they would do it tomorrow, their father would tell them ‘D.I.N. – do it now’. As he explains, ‘you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through’. This approach paid dividends when he came to work with John Lennon. Every time they sat down to write a song they would finish it, and they never once came away from a writing session having failed to come up with something. “I’m all for that way of working,’ he has said. ‘Once John and I or I alone started a song, there was nowhere else to go; we had to finish it, and it was a great discipline. There’s something about doing it when you have the vision.’

Ok, that was a lot. Let’s wrap this up with 5 of my favorite books about the Beatles!

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Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. Spring has sprung in Austin, Texas. “The trees are coming into leaf / like something almost being said…” The mountain laurel are flowering and filling the air with grape soda perfume. Athena the Great Horned Owl has laid her first egg. Our Pisces baby is about to turn eleven. “Tender age in bloom.” While evil men do everything they can to destroy this planet, I’m thinking of David Hockney: “Spring cannot be canceled.” 
   
   

2. Galileo’s handwritten notes discovered in an ancient astronomy text.
   
   

3. A lost 19th century film by French filmmaker George Méliès discovered in The Library of Congress. (Have you checked out their National Screen Room of free motion pictures? it’s incredible. Watch, for example, this 1894 film of Japanese dancers. For fun, put it on a loop and play different bits of music over it.)
   
   

4. Levi Stahl on “Rainbow Connection,” film noir, and Four Quartets.
   
   

5. How yellow became Van Gogh’s most powerful color.

   

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6. “She stuffed nearly all her notebooks with newspaper cuttings, scraps of notes, telegrams, letters, sometimes even a bird’s feather or a leaf.” Susan Sontag’s playground of ideas.
   
   

7. The two funniest things I watched this week: the first half of “Covercraft,” an episode of The Simpsons in which “Homer has a mid-life crisis, takes up bass guitar and forms a cover band with some of the other dads in town” (to quote my children: “Papa, they made a Simpsons about you!”) and this 12-second Arrested Development clip of David Cross as Mrs. Featherbottom which we all agreed is worth more laughs than the entire 2 hours and 4 minutes of Mrs. Doubtfire.
   
   

8. “The best things in life are free / but you can give them to the birds and bees…” Mason Currey writes about how to be a writer with a day job and Manjula Martin and friends bring back Scratch as “a weekly newsletter about how your favorite writers are surviving. (Or not.)”
   
   

9. “‘There’s life, death, and bad writing,’ he told his students. ‘Only one is avoidable.’” RIP engineer and producer Bob Power, who worked with artists like D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and A Tribe Called Quest. (Here’s a list of 10 songs he engineered.) Power said: “Great music is made by people who either don’t care or don’t understand what is ‘normal,’ so they do something extraordinary.”
   
   

10. An assignment for next week: Send somebody something in the mail.
    

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

From time to time, my friend Warren Craghead sends me drawings on postcards in the mail. One day I decided to put one of Warren’s postcards at the center of a tape and magazine collage. Then I did it again. Pretty soon I had a little series going, but I got distracted working on other things. Luckily, Warren keeps sending me postcards. Now I’ve got a good stack of them ready to keep the series going.

I really, really love getting and sending stuff in the mail. (One reason I love the typewriter interviews so much — all I need from the people I interview is a mailing address!) I have this ad that the late great Jason Polan ran in The New Yorker pinned to the bulletin board beside my desk:

I’m trying to pass this joy on to my boys. My 13-year-old used to read the Kids Section of the New York Times from cover to cover until they canceled it, so I recently subscribed us to The Onion in print.

It’s so fun when we get a new one in the mail. The boys will study it over each other’s shoulders and read the really good headlines out loud.

My other favorite print subscriptions are quarterly magazines like The Idler. (Getting a magazine only once a season means I actually have time to read it.)

It’s interesting to me how many artists are using the ease of digital services to provide analog, mail-based subscriptions. Cartoonists like Kevin Huizenga and John Porcellino, for example, have tiers on their Patreons where you can receive their zines in the mail.

Here’s a fun zine I got in the mail recently called The Cloud Report, made by artist Christine Tyler Hill. Hill is a crossing guard and the zine is a report of her observations at the intersection:

Oh, by the way, if you ever want to send me anything in the mail, here’s my address:

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Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I was delighted (and a little overwhelmed, honestly!) by the response to last Friday’s announcement of my next book, Don’t Call It Art. Many people asked if they could order signed and personalized copies — the answer is yes! You can pre-order from Book People here in Austin, Texas and I’ll not only sign and personalize as many as you want, I’ll draw in them, too, like I do in all my other books:
   

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2. “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”1 That’s Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, a favorite of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, whose new book The Score: How To Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game both thrilled and exasperated me. I’m still processing it, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now I’ll just say: I think it’s such a pleasure to see an academic write in a conversational voice and swing for the fences with a book that appeals to a general audience. “All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,” he says, and it’s hard not to love a writer who’s so passionate and articulate about his pasttimes. (See: my letter, “Your hobby looks exhausting!”)
   
   

3. The funniest thing I watched all week was Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching, a full-length documentary streaming for free on YouTube. (I think Nguyen would love it — it’s about what happens when a scoring system takes over a pleasurable hobby!)
   
   

4. “I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.” Like everybody else, I was thrilled by Alysa Liu’s gold medal-winning free skate at the Olympics and the story about how she went away so she could come back. I was reminded of the words of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah: “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” If you’re playing the game you want to play the way you want to play it, you’ve already won.
   
   

5. Oliver Burkeman has a helpful term he calls “unclenching,” which he describes as “a psychological ’move’ that involves relaxing in the midst of anxiety and uncertainty.” He’s been writing really great newsletters on the theme, such as “The freewriting way of life” and “Nobody’s ever ready,” which was about avoiding the anxiety around whether you’ll get “left behind” if you’re not into A.I. Great mantra: “Unclench!”
   
   

6. Pizza night: Watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a good excuse to show the boys this 1974 BBC clip of Terry Gilliam on his cutout animation technique.
   
   

7. “There is always, in every piece I do, something wrong.” RIP French composer and musique concrète legend Éliane Radigue. (Here are essays on her life and work by Louise Gray and Geeta Dayal.)
   
   

8. “[She] described the book she’d like to see written, the book she said she’d want to read. She went into what I could only describe as a literary jazz riff for about 20 minutes. Her tempo increased as she spoke. She concluded by saying, ‘So, if that’s what you want to write, if you want to write a book about the cathedral within, then that’s a book I want to buy.’” RIP editor and publisher Ann Godoff.
   
   

9. “I want things to be intentional and slow. I don’t need them to be optimized.” I spent part of the weekend painting a cassette rack Meghan bought me to hold my mixtapes, so yeah, I enjoyed this story about a man in Los Angeles repairing old tape decks.

   

10. If you’d like a weird peek inside my brain (and how this newsletter often comes together) I wrote about how I get into something new.
    

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

First off, thanks for all the enthusiasm about my next book! It was a fun weekend.

My long-suffering editor suggested the topic of today’s letter. On one of our morning walks, she said to me, “You have a very particular way you go about getting into something that’s new-to-you. Why not tell people about it?” 

So, here are 3 things I do when I want to go deep on a new interest, beyond just searching Wikipedia and letting the algorithm show me what it wants me to see or thinks I want to see…

1. Filtered search.

Back when Twitter wasn’t a garbage fire, the first thing I’d do when I started investigating a new piece of culture — say an artist or a TV show — was perform a “People You Follow” search. Depending on the subject, the search might result in pages and pages of links, all handily selected for me by people I already find interesting. I still do this, but as more and more people make the completely reasonable and sane decision to delete their accounts and stop posting there, it becomes less and less valuable.

These days, I start with something much simpler: I search my email!

As, uh, recent current events have shown, your email essentially functions as a personal, searchable archive. I’ve had the same email address for over 20 years, and I archive emails more than I delete them, so searching for something like “Tolstoy” or “Sherlock Holmes” will turn up any number of items.

An email search also can remind me who I know who’s into a particular topic. When I know somebody who’s into something that’s new-to-me, I will search their website before texting or emailing to bother them about it. For example, if I was getting back into P.G. Wodehouse, I would search my friend Alan Jacobs’ blog:

 wodehouse site:https://ayjay.org

Or, if I was re-watching the films of Michael Mann, I might search my friend Matt Thomas’s blog:

michael mann site:https://submittedforyourperusal.com

What I’m aiming for here is items on a subject that have already been filtered through the attention of people I like paying attention to.

The other way to do this is to search publications I already like reading. For example, if I discover a writer, I will always look to see if there’s a Paris Review interview or a New Yorker profile or an obituary from The New York Times. (I was delighted last week when Ann Friedman said she was going to steal my idea to search for to search for your favorite contemporary author in the Bookworm archive.)

2. Multimedia immersion.

This is something we’ve learned from raising the boys: When they get into something, we try to load them up with every kind of media we can think of.

If you’re looking at an artist, for example, of course you’ll start with the medium the artist worked in. If I was getting into the musician Sun Ra for the first time, there are plenty of Sun Ra albums to listen to. But I would next ask: Are there any movies about Sun Ra? Books? Articles? Podcasts?

A quick search of my email tells/reminds me:

• In Viv Albertine’s memoir, she writes about how the Slits listened to Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” when they were on tour and how much they were inspired by him (this was an export of my notes from the ebook, which reminds me I need to do that more and copy it into my commonplace book)

• David Toop writes about Sun Ra in Ocean of Sound

• There’s a brand-new American Masters bio on PBS called Sun Ra: Do The Impossible

• Hua Hsu wrote a profile of Sun Ra in The New Yorker in 2021

• My friend Warren Craghead listened to the whole Sun Ra catalog and posted a drawing and a review of each album

So immediately, I would have things to read, watch, and look at while I’m listening to Sun Ra! But of course, I could go much further.

A quick search of The Austin Public Library reveals that right now I could check out the documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, Paul Youngquist’s book A Pure Solar World, and a book about the cover art of Sun Ra’s record label.

Meanwhile, searching for “Sun Ra” in the Podcasts app of my phone reveals all sorts of episodes and whole podcasts devoted to Sun Ra. Browsing through, I think, “Oh, Sound Opinions, I know that show,” and searching their site, I find a playlist of songs about space.

Let’s not forget maybe the greatest place to search: YouTube. Somebody has uploaded the entirety of Space is the Place, Sun Ra’s 1974 Afrofuturist science fiction film. And here’s a 2014 Tiny Desk performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra with a 91-year-old Marshall Allen leading the band. (A search for “Marshall Allen” reveals that he’s still playing, that he just turned 101, and only last year released an album called New Dawn.)

This searching of YouTube reminds me of something Robin Sloan said last month, that I found, of course, by searching my email:

You have really got to start watching lec­tures with less than a thou­sand views on YouTube. The algo­rithm won’t get you there. Instead, go searching. Use random terms of interest; add “lecture”; filter for videos over 20 min­utes long. This, not the infi­nite Cheez-It box of ver­tical video, is the promise of the internet!!

Ok, let’s try it with Sun Ra. Boom! Somebody has uploaded Sun Ra’s lectures at Berkeley in 1971!

Maybe ten minutes of searching, and we have more Sun Ra than we can possibly handle in one week.

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Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. My next book is Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. It was inspired by my time spent as a studio assistant to my two sons when they were really little and the lessons I learned from them about loving and caring for yourself as a creative person. The book is designed to put you back in touch with that wild and fearless 4-year-old kid that still lives inside you and wants to come out and play. The release date is June 2, but you can pre-order it now wherever you love to buy books:
   
   

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   It’s a weird time, to say the very least, to be putting out a book about curiosity and wonder and freedom and fun and humor and imperfection and magic. But it’s also a time when, I think, we could desperately use those things in our lives. Watching my kids draw and make music and come alive to the world unlocked something in me that I’ve been trying to get into book form for over 10 years. I really can’t wait to share it with y’all. If you liked any of my other books, you will love this one.

   

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2. I borrowed the title from John Baldessari: ”I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.” (And Brian Eno’s diary: “People do much better when they don’t think they’re being artists… if you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.”)

   
   

3. “There is a hugely underestimated intelligence attached to manual labor…. When you use your own energy, your own body, you have to be economical about how you do it. If you’re picking potatoes all day, or picking stones, you are working repetitively. You have to work with a rhythm and a fluidity, and you can’t be fighting it or forcing it. That’s really important for what I do as an artist—if you work with the right flow and rhythm, you give the work that rhythm.” A profile of Andy Goldsworthy.
   
   

4. “It felt like the opposite of the machine. No one could mistake my drawings for an actual statement; they were wobbly and imperfect, obviously made by my hand.” Kate Bingaman-Burt on 20 years of her daily purchase drawings. (Do not miss her typewriter interview!)
   
   

5. RIP civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Take some time today to watch him reciting “I am somebody” with kids on Sesame Street and reading from Green Eggs and Ham on Saturday Night Live. (To quote bell hooks, “We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor.”)
   
   

6. RIP filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who didn’t make his first feature until he was thirty-six, and went on to make forty-seven of them! I had a quote from Wiseman in the first draft of Keep Going — his work embodied the message of the book! — but it felt too jarring in the context of the page, so we cut it. Here it is:

   

   
   

7. RIP actor Robert Duvall, who said of his favorite role, “When I finished Lonesome Dove I said to myself, ‘Now I can retire. I’ve done something. Let the English play Hamlet. I’ll play Augustus McCrae.’” (Gus is one of my favorite characters in literature and Larry McMurtry’s novel is one of my favorite books. It’s the perfect big book for summer. Or any other season, for that matter.)
   
   

8. RIP actor Tom Noonan, whose passing gives me an excuse to watch Michael Mann’s Heat for the 100th time.
   
   

9. “You are a human animal…” RIP Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s Bookworm. The Bookworm archive is really incredible — just earlier this year I found four episodes with writer Robert Stone, spanning the years 1992-2007. Try typing “Bookworm” and your favorite author’s name into your podcast app and see what comes up. (Here are Silverblatt’s 10 “rules” for reading.)
   
   

10. A delightful typewriter interview with cartoonist Tom Hart.

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. I did remember to mention there’s a new book coming, right?

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Hey y’all,

Tom Hart is a cartoonist who’s been teaching comics and graphic novels for over 20 years. He started The Sequential Artists Workshop, a non-profit comics school and creative community whose latest project is Young in Iran, a collection of memoir comics by Gen Z comic creators in Iran. (It has only 3 days to go on Kickstarter, so check it out.)

Last year Tom published an updated paperback edition of Rosalie Lightning, his incredible #1 New York Times bestselling graphic memoir about the untimely death of his young daughter, Rosalie.

This typewriter interview was conducted via the magic of the United States Postal Service. (For a plain-text version with links, see the P.S. below.)

Big thanks to Tom for being the 16th participant in this series of typewriter interviews.

Check out Tom’s work, SAW’s Kickstarter, and go out and get a copy of Rosalie Lightning.

Thanks, as always, to paid subscribers who buy me the time to do all the email coordinating, typing, snail-mailing, and scanning that goes into them. If you haven’t yet, consider supporting my work with a paid subscription!

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. Here is the plain-text version of our interview with links:

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Hey y’all,

Today is Friday the 13th. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. My favorite thing I wrote this week was a Tuesday Trio based on the 2001 short documentary and cult classic, The PriceMaster.
   
   

2. “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” I got about halfway through Wuthering Heights and gave up, so I laughed quite a bit while reading this review. (I remember enjoying the artsy/trashy mix of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, so a “smooth-brained” adaptation might be up my alley, honestly!) But I know many people who love the novel, so let’s take a poll:

3. You might be tired of me talking about the band Geese, but too bad because they recorded an NPR Tiny Desk concert and it was great. (Also, if you’re new to Bad Bunny via his Super Bowl performance, check out his Tiny Desk concert!)
   
   

4. Love is not a gadget. Love is not mind-reading. “Love don’t make things nice.”
   
   

5. “Love is a mixtape.” Here’s my latest Valentine’s Day mixtape, called “Love TKO.” Teddy Pendergrass, Barry White, Bill Withers, and more. You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

   

6. Comics: I got a copy of Facing Feelings: The Art of Raina Telgemeier for my 10-year-old cartoonist. (He’s read all her books, including her latest with Scott McCloud, The Cartoonists Club.) Facing Feelings was originally a career retrospective at The Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus, Ohio. They just announced that their next show is dedicated to the work of Chris Ware.
   
   

7. App: I’m always maxing out my iPhone storage from taking too many photos, so I am in love with the “Swipe Mode” function of Clever Cleaner. It pulls up your photo library month by month and lets you delete or keep photos by swiping left or right. Extremely handy, and it doubles as a great way to revisit old photos and memories. (Thanks, Recomendo!)
   
   

8. Decaf: I’ve been drinking lots of barley tea. (I get mine from Asahi Imports here in Austin, TX.)
   
   

9. RIP Fred Smith, who left Blondie to play bass in Television. (Debbie Harry is quoted in the great book Please Kill Me as saying, “Boy, did he make a mistake.” But… he played on “Marquee Moon!”)
   
   

10. Burp your studio!

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

On February 10th, 2001, a group of friends held a garage sale in Denton, Texas. The sale was immortalized in a surreal, 32-minute short documentary that has since become a cult classic. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the happening, today’s Tuesday Trio — one book, one record, and one movie based on a theme — is dedicated to The PriceMaster.

📖 The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)

The PriceMaster begins with two quotes from Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 book The Medium is the Massage. The first quote comes from page 68:

“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The ground rules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or counter situations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly…” 

The second quote comes from page 92:

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment — of what’s really going — affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.

Combined, they form an epigraph that serves as mission statement for the performance art that is about to unfold onscreen.

The Medium is the Massage was an influence on the design of my own book, Steal Like an Artist. The visual magic of Medium came from graphic designer Quentin Fiore:

Mr. Fiore’s first book with McLuhan was “The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” (1967). “Massage” was a printer’s error, but McLuhan, a wordsmith who delighted in puns, liked the typo and kept it, believing that it amplified his theory about how different forms of media thoroughly “massage” the senses in the “mass age” of communications.

The book, which Mr. Fiore initiated, was a kinetic interpretation of McLuhan’s philosophy. Some pages were printed backward, to be read in a mirror. Some of the writing was upside down. Some pages contained text superimposed over pictures.

Mr. Fiore said his goal was to reduce “complex ideas to simple signs, glyphs, patches of text.”

You may wonder about the credit on the front cover: “Produced by Jerome Agel.” That’s another story we don’t quite have the room for today.

If you like The Medium is The Massage, I highly recommend The Electric Information Age Book and The Book of Gossage.

💿 The Sound Of Won Jang-hyun’s Daegeum (1998)

The daegeum is a big bamboo flute used in traditional Korean music. A daegeum sanjo (“sanjo” meaning “scattered melodies”) is a performance of solo flute, accompanied by a drum. You can watch one here:

The Sound Of Won Jang-hyun’s Daegeum is the record you hear in the background of The PriceMaster. Like any great soundtrack, it’s impossible, now, to imagine the film without it.

The music would’ve sounded strange enough to the Western ears of the people of Denton, Texas, but it was made even stranger by the fact that it was being played forwards and backwards on a 4-track cassette recorder.

I’ve taken the first track of the CD and pasted it forwards and backwards so you can get an idea of the effect. (Crank it in your studio and see how long you can last!)

If you dig the flute, but need something a little more chill, try André 3000’s New Blue Sun or Laraaji’s “Segue to Infinity.” 

🎥 The PriceMaster (2001)

Finally, we come to The Pricemaster itself. From the film’s description:

"Everything is for sale." "Make me an offer!" . . . the wonderful mantras of the prophet of Captive Market Capitalism (i.e. American Style Corporate Capitalism) echo pertinently on a crisp winter day in Denton, TX in the newborn hours of the great decisive 21st Century. Members of the hallowed Fast House look on and document the unfolding.

From a recent article in D Magazine, “Everything Is (Still) For Sale: Denton Celebrates 25 Years of The PriceMaster”:

The PriceMaster itself was born of an idea artist Rick Perry had while helping an ex-girlfriend host a garage sale.

“There were these folks that were very serious garage sellers who came earlier than the posted time,” he explains. “[They] were these kind of older…coiffed hair…Sunday best kind of garage sellers who were very serious and sort of aggressive and kind of rude to us and sort of looked down on the meager offerings of our little yard sale.”

Perry decided to develop a subversive garage sale where he and his friends could have total control. The idea was that if someone made them an offer, they would raise the price and refuse to sell them anything. Nathan Austin brought the idea of the PriceMaster character into the mix and everyone went with it. Another friend, Nova Martin, brought a camera to record the proceedings; she and Perry captured the footage that ultimately became The Pricemaster.

I think The PriceMaster ranks alongside other great “Texas is a weird place” filmed stories such as Hands on a Hardbody (1997), David Byrne’s True Stories (1986), Mike Judge’s King of The Hill (1997-), and Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) and Bernie (2011).

I recommend watching it with your friends and loved ones so you can toss lines off to each other like, “Make me an offer!” and “SEVENTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!”

I’m having fun with these Tuesday Trios and I hope you are, too. If you missed the first 3 letters in the series, they are: “Radioactivity,” “Problematic Gifts,” and “Sherlock Holmes.”

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

This letter is brought to you by 120mg of pseudoephedrine. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?” I finally finished book two of Michel de Montaigne’s The Complete Essays. I’ve been reading 5-10 pages every morning of 2026, and every morning Montaigne tells me something about his life in the 16th century that speaks directly to mine in the 21st. (Pro-tip: Break bread with the dead!) Here’s what my chonky Penguin Classics paperback looks like:

   

2. That stuff I’ve penciled on the pages is called an edge index. It’s a great way to make a book your own and better understand its structure. Here’s a video of how I make one in my logbook:

   
   

3. How to play my favorite drawing game: Exquisite corpse!
   
   

4. I subscribed to The Onion in print and the first issue we got in the mail was a gigantic hit with my teen and tween. They spent all of dinner reading the headlines out loud to each other and laughing. My favorite sound in the world.
   
   

5. Filmmaker Penny Lane shares 5 funny documentaries for dark times.
   
   

6. Film critic Stephanie Zacharek lists the 50 most underappreciated movies of the 21st century. (A few of my favorites: American Splendor, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.)
   
   

7. Tobias Wolff reading his short story “Bullet in the Brain.” (From his marvelous collection, The Night in Question.)

   
   

8. “When in doubt, play insane.” RIP actress Catherine O’Hara. She was great in everything I’ve seen, but the stuff that jumps to my mind: Home Alone, Beetlejuice, Schitt’s Creek, The Studio, and, of course, Best in Show. On the importance of having a sense of humor, she said: “My husband and I laugh about everything all day long… My parents were blessed – they laughed until the end. That’s the best way to live, because there’s so much sadness. You’re really lucky if your sense of humor is encouraged, because I think we’re all born with it, and if it’s encouraged in your life, that’s a gift.”

   
   

9. Novelist Edan Lepucki’s 45 notes to self on life, parenting, and writing.

   
   

10. G.K. Chesterton: “It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.”
    

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. I had a ball with the teachers attending @theartofed conference. (Hit me up if you’re looking for a speaker for your event!)

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Hey y’all,

The full moon played tricks on us and we had bail on our previously planned Sunday dinner spot. It’s a special kind of torture waiting to be served at a mediocre restaurant with two hangry tweens. To pass the time, I pulled out my pocket notebook — I never leave home without it! — and we played a few rounds of exquisite corpse, a game invented by the Surrealists:

Participants play by taking turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper, folded to hide each individual contribution. The first player adds a head—then, without knowing what that head looks like, the next artist adds a torso, and so on. In this way, a strange, comical, often grotesque creature is born.

Our results:

Four years ago, the kids helped me make a silly video showing folks how to play:

I love this video so much. The creative chaos of those days is exactly what I was trying to bottle up for my next book, Don’t Call It Art. In fact, there’s an illustration in the book that includes a few of our corpses:

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