Autumn leaves

10 things worth sharing this week + 20% off subscriptions

A collage I made for my September mixtape

Hey y’all,

To celebrate my favorite season, I’m throwing a harvest sale on paid subscriptions:

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

1. “Skateboarders tend to follow a trajectory. They skate, then they get into photography, then they get into bicycles, and then they get into birding.” That was a funny line by Will Keating in a great New Yorker profile of bicycle designer Grant Petersen, “The Art of Taking it Slow.” The anti-racer, anti-spandex ethos in Grant’s book Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike was a huge influence on me when I first started riding my bicycle. To quote the book: “Your bike is a toy. Have fun with it.” (I also recommend the Rivendell instagram and Grant’s blog.)
   
   

2. My own middle-age trajectory is: moon-gazing, owl-watching, riding bicycles, and now, listening to jazz. If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t mind hanging out at the Five Spot in New York City in the year 1959, preferably during the spring, when Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um were all recorded. (I know we tend to romanticize scenes like this, but the idea of having a drink in the same bar with Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara while some of the greatest musicians of all time play onstage? I mean, dang.)
   
   

3. Speaking of scenius, John Hendrix’s new graphic novel biography about the remarkable Inklings fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Mythmakers, is out this week. (I love Hendrix’s drawings — especially his sketchbooks.)
   
   

4. What we can learn about art, business and raising a family from how Duke Ellington ran his band. (Inspired by Ted Gioia’s wonderful book, How To Listen to Jazz.)
   
   

5. I was at a kids’ birthday party last weekend and a mom friend said to me, “I still think about that time you told me, ‘One day they’ll get up, grab a Pop Tart, and turn on the TV while you sleep in.’” I chuckled because that was something my friend Tim said to me when my kids were really little. “It goes so fast!” people often say to young parents, “Enjoy it!” And it’s true, but it’s the last thing you want to hear when you’re sleep-deprived and half out of your mind. Oh, yeah? I’d think. Well I wish it’d go a little faster. I thought back on those days when I read Mitchell Volk’s letter about being in “survival mode” with his second kid. I sent him something I wrote when my boys were 6 and 3: “Beyond survival mode.”
   
   

6. As Thoreau told us, “Live in each season as it passes.” Two pieces of writing I like to re-read on the subject: my friend Matt Thomas’s “Fall In” and Joy Williams’ “Autumn.”
   
   

7. I’ve been meaning to make time to dig through the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
   
   

8. At the movies: If you’re looking for a light little flick that’s half HGTV show and half cautionary tale about the perils of nostalgia in middle-age, check out the documentary about the South Park creators trying to save their favorite childhood restaurant, ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! (I’m looking forward to the third Paddington movie, which is supposedly influenced by Werner Herzog.)
   
   

9. Ear candy: I made an “Autumn Leaves” mixtape for the end of September, inspired by all the jazz I’ve been listening to, with a few detours. (Playlist on Spotify.) This week I also listened to a bunch of WKCR and Lee Konitz’s Subconscious-Lee and picked up a beautiful 2XLP reissue of Dorothy Ashby’s Afro-Harping. (Weirdly, I left this recording from the 80s of her performing the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” off the mixtape.) 
   
   

10. I love the light and the color this time of year. Down here in Texas, you see fall before you feel it. Your assignment this week: Try a 30-minute noticing workout and go on a color collecting walk.
    

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xoxo,

Austin

a page from “The Creative Seasons”