Apply ass to chair

10 things worth sharing this week

A page from my commonplace diary

Hey y’all,

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

1. The folks at Art21 have put season one of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” up on YouTube, but over 75 hours of full episodes are always on view, free of charge, in the Art21 Library. They also have a book coming out in January called Artists & The Unknown, full of interviews with artists such as Amy Sillman. (Her book Faux Pas was one of my favorite reads this year.)
   
   

2. The word of the year: Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary says it’s “enshittification” (a little late, y’all, that was last year) while Oxford says it’s “brain rot.” Clearly, the two are connected. (“Brain rot,” by the way, was first used by my boy Henry David Thoreau in Walden: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”)
   
   

3. I was delighted that my friend Sara Hendren did the “who taught me” exercise from my gratitude zine with her family again this year. “We’ll do this every year and save them from now on as a mini scrapbook. Recommended, for Thanksgiving or even for a New Year’s Eve looking-back activity.” (I made a new zine for the upcoming winter solstice: “More Light!”)

   
   

4. Year-end lists from a few of my favorite critics: Amanda Petrusich’s best albums of 2024 and Stephanie Zacharek’s best movies of 2024. (This time of year I always think of Stephanie’s advice to pay attention to the bottom of year-end lists “where the oddball magic really happens. The movies here are the stragglers, the drifters, the hobos that not all of society loves. These are movies that may have been kicked off the list, put back on and kicked off again – they don’t ask for easy membership in any club.” Watch my interview with Stephanie and her friend Dwight Garner from earlier this year for more of this kind of wisdom!)
   
   

5. One of my all-time favorite books came up in Dwight’s latest review: Joe Brainard’s memoir, I Remember. “I hadn’t read it until I picked it up in preparation to write this piece. Now I consider it one of the best books I know.” If you’ve never read the book, I recommend treating yourself to a copy of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, which contains the entire text.

   
   

6. Music dockumentary: Yacht Rock is about “the rise of the smooth West Coast sound pioneered by artists like Steely Dan, Toto, and Michael McDonald” and later given the name “Yacht Rock” by a bunch of comedians in a 2005 webseries. A highly enjoyable watch that gave me an “I Keep Forgettin’” earworm for days. (Pair it with another great film from HBO’s Music Box series, Listening to Kenny G.)

   
   
   

7. “I don't think it matters how, it's justifying and making the time to do it at all. Doing it is where it's at I think.” Mason Currey shares advice from Cindy Lee, who made my favorite album of 2024, Diamond Jubilee. (I am one of those early nerds who downloaded the WAV files and burned them to CD.)
   
   

8. Kids show: Our whole family loves PBS KIDS’ latest, Carl The Collector, created by Zachariah OHora. The show is extra special to us because the main character is autistic. (“I explain autism as often feeling like everyone read this social skills rulebook, except for me, but I’m still expected to take the test,” says Ava X. Rigelhaupt, one of the writers of the show.) Every time the show comes on we sing along to the theme song: “Carl! Carl! Carl!”
   
   

9. “I didn’t take animation seriously because it came easily to me. It took me a long time to realize, maybe it comes easily to me and it’s fun because I’m good at it. Maybe that’s what a talent is called, but you feel like you have to beat yourself up and do things the hard way or it doesn’t count.” An interview with Don Hertzfeldt.
   
   

10. Actress Lucy Liu on her art studio: “It’s a safe space. You can make a mess and you can leave it and come back to it. I think it’s important to make a mess because sometimes that’s how creative things happen. At my son’s school, if he was doing something creative and had to transition to another project, they would put a work-save card on it and say just don’t touch it. And that’s essentially what a studio is. The whole space is a work-save card.”

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. The subject line of this email comes from my writing teacher Steven Bauer, who used to tell us that the first rule of writing is “Apply ass to chair.”