Flowers from Texas

10 things worth sharing + a few SXSW tips

Some bluebonnets I saw on our morning walk

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…

    

    Don’t Call It Art. Coming June 2, 2026 to a bookstore near you.

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xoxo,

Austin