A path with a view

10 things worth sharing this week

Bike path along Huntington Beach, CA

Hey y’all,

I just got back from a short family trip to Los Angeles. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing from our adventures and beyond:

1. Disneyland wasn’t quite as magical for us as last time, but it was still fun. Highlights: riding the monorail, Star Tours, Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railroad, and the incredible amount of junk food we ate: corn dogs, popcorn, pickles, churros, and Dole Whip. What most struck me this time around was the incredible landscaping of the park and hotel grounds. It made me want to visit more botanical gardens. (I wish I could visit Longwood Gardens outside of Philadelphia once a season.)

   
   

2. The first big highlight of the trip for me was renting a metro e-bike across the street from our hotel (total cost: $6) and ripping through Los Feliz to meet my pal James for a morning ride on the LA River Bike Path. The second highlight was having an impromptu Dairy Queen picnic in Huntington Beach, finding sand dollars, playing fetch with random pups we befriended, and admiring the bike path. (Virginia Woolf said you need “a room of one’s own” — give me a bike path with a view!)
   
   

3. Punk damage: My friend Mike Monteiro took a header off his e-bike in San Francisco this week while headed to the post office to mail copies of the new zine edition of Design is a Job. (The first edition was one of the recommended reads in the back of Show Your Work!) He’s currently working one-armed, but he’ll still mail you one.
   
   

4. “Notice. Collect. Share.” On the plane out to LAX I blitzed through Russell Davies’ book, Do Interesting, part of the Do series of handbooks. If you’re a fan of Jessica Hagy’s How To Be Interesting or Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing — as you should be! — you’ll dig it.
   
   

5. “Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does…” A writer/artist Davies quotes over and over again is James Bridle, whose book Ways of Being looks very interesting. (I need to check out his On Being interview.)
   
   

6. How to title your art. I don’t endorse all of these tips, but as the folks at Recomendo pointed out, they could be helpful for anybody who has to come up with titles or headlines to sell anything. (Coming up with titles is hard!)
   
   

7. “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time” is the title of track one on André 3000’s new instrumental album, New Blue Sun, out today. I haven’t listened just yet, but I really enjoyed this long NPR interview on the flight home — I even doodled some notes. (To watch him play his flute and do laundry, see his GQ video cover story.)
   
   

8. For some jazz + flute pre-gaming, I put on John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, Pharaoh Sanders’s Pharoah, and this Spotify playlist of a jazz flute comp suggested to me by my friend Mark.
   
   

9. If you prefer your music with lyrics, Cat Power Sings Dylan is a song-by-song recreation of Bob Dylan’s “Royal Albert Hall” Concert and it sounded wonderful in my noise-canceling headphones. Watch her do “Like A Rolling Stone” on The Tonight Show. (One of this week’s themes: New albums nobody asked for but I personally am extremely happy to receive.)
   
   

10. Thanksgiving is already next week! A few years ago I made a free zine you can print and fold and fill out called “My Gratitude Zine.” There’s also a simplified version on that page for kiddos. Please feel free to share it far and wide.

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

Sunset over the Matterhorn