10 things that've made my 2025 (so far)

Writing, travel, music, and more...

Me in my happy place

Hey y’all,

Last Friday I shared my 10 favorite reads from the first half of the year, so today I thought I’d share 10 other things that’ve made the first half of my year:

1. Finally bringing a new book into being. I spent the first half of the year writing and drawing my next book, one that’s taken me half a decade to get right. I had to reach into my old bag of tricks and also come up with some new ones. One new way of putting an old trick: “Open the document, stay in the document.”
   
   

2. Dub reggae. Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, is just a tad too academic for my taste, but is full of wonderful stuff about some of the greatest music ever made. Reading it got me listening to old favorites like King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown, Super Ape, and Heart of the Congos. (“Dub reggae is the peak of human achievement,” is how my friend Thor Harris puts it.) I even attempted a few dub remixes of my own that I shared in my April bouquet.
   
   

3. Block printing. I’d carved blocks before, but after I took a little block printing workshop led by designer Dana Tanamachi during a visit to Laity Lodge, I went a little nuts for it. At a certain point in spring, all I wanted to do in the studio was listen to dub reggae and make block prints. I was even moved to write an unofficial guide to block printing. (Cartoonist Roz Chast is really into block printing right now and shows her work on Instagram.)
   
   

4. Moving pictures. The work Erik Winkowski is doing in Paper Films jump-started something in my imagination. In particular, I was blown away by his “Zinemail No. 1” dispatch. I immediately started thinking about how I could bring some animation into the work I was already doing, so I made a moving block print and one of my collages with an animated frame.
   
   

5. Weird Little Somethings. I believe we should all make Weird Little Somethings once in a while — things that are a little “off brand,” things that are different from what people expect of us, and different from what we expect of ourselves. (An example: my short video, “The Inflatable Man.”)
   
   

6. Having an archive to dip into and repurpose. September will be the 20th anniversary of my blog! I’ve been making work for so long now that there’s always opportunity to bring old work into new forms for new readers, like when I reformatted my Read Like an Artist tips into a downloadable zine.
   
   

7. Making mixtapes. I was already into my monthly mixtape project when Walter Martin began his radio show last year, but listening to him every week and downloading his infectious enthusiasm for music has gotten me even more into making my own mixes. I love popping one on when I come into the studio.
   
   

8. How AI slop is making us think about what it means to be human and make art. The more I read about AI, the more it solidifies my feeling that image-making and writing are at their most meaningful — to the artist and to the audience — when they involve the head, the heart, and the hand. As I said in an interview back in April, “I try to bring the hand into almost everything I do, because the hand knows as much as the head does.”

   
   

9. New Orleans. I always assumed I was too uptight for New Orleans, and I wound up really liking it and wishing to go back sooner than later. (“When something that is not your thing blows you away, that's one of the best things that can happen,” wrote Dave Hickey in The Perfect Wave. “It means you are something other than you thought you were.”)
   
   

10. Seeing projects through. In addition to sticking with this book long enough to see it into the world, I’m on my 5th year of my commonplace diary, which means the pages of that little book are filling up. The typewriter interviews are turning into quite the series. This newsletter itself is growing and my sense of what it can be (and what I can be) is growing. The more I think about the meaning of discipline, the more I agree with Robert Fripp, who says, “Discipline, primarily, is our capacity to make a commitment in time.” If there’s anything I’ve learned in the past two decades it’s this: If you show up every day, the days turn into something.
    

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 extra exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin