Getting in and out of trouble
10 things worth sharing this week + 20% off subscriptions
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Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
Artist Amy Sillman on how her creative work is about getting in and out of trouble.
Even though I didn’t watch it with a pair of headphones, I liked the documentary 32 Sounds, especially the spine-tingling scene of physicist Edgar Choueiri listening to a recording he made when he was 11 years old: “Although you exist in a different time, I am talking to you through this machine I have in my hands.”
“There’s something I started writing about, about a year ago: listening ‘with’ as opposed to listening ‘to.’ And it’s my sense that if I’m standing here, I’m just one of many organisms that are listening with one another within this environment.” Learning to listen with composer Annea Lockwood.
A poem: “I Worried” by Mary Oliver, read by Helena Bonham Carter.
In Tuesday’s letter, I asked, “How do you draw time?” I got some terrific responses from y’all, like the cosmic calendar from Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Richard McGuire’s Here (see #7 of this letter), and a TikTok video of co-workers comparing how they visualize the year.
Documentaries occasionally have epigraphs, and if I were to add one to Will & Harper, a movie about Will Ferrell going on a road trip with his trans friend Harper Steele, I’d choose The National’s lyric, “No, I wouldn’t go out alone into America.” (I noted the phrases “uncharted waters” and “unknown territory” in the story — to hit the edge of our maps can be scary, but also thrilling, and, if we carry on with a sense of adventure, ultimately enlarging.)
“This is where I'm staying / This is my home…” I heard Bjork’s “Anchor Song” for the first time while shopping at Breakaway Records. Here’s a lesson from Ethan Hein on what’s musically special about the song.
A popcorn flick for grown-ups: Meg and I enjoyed the low-key “silver-fox charm” of Pitt and Clooney in Wolfs.
RIP actress Maggie Smith. (I’ve been meaning to watch her in A Room With A View.) RIP actor John Amos. (I’m almost always in the mood to watch Coming To America.) RIP “American Renaissance man” Kris Kristofferson. (It’s the perfect “open season on suckheads” to watch Blade.)
Your assignment this week comes from Kristofferson’s interpretation of William Blake: “He’s telling you that you’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”
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xoxo,
Austin
PS. For every book I write, I start a fresh banker’s box — here’s a peek from my Instagram stories at what’s inside them:
As a writer who was only a writer, I decided after many published books to switch careers and try collage. In the past two years, I kept at it and would just finish one and start another, placing the finished work in wax paper and shelved in my closet. Then I read SHOW YOUR WORK and low and behold, I did just that this past Friday to the tune of an 80% sellout. Thank you for your book of encouragement and direction for this hitherto intimidated "artist."
Austin, thank you as usual. This excellent post hit a lot of my buttons, and created some new ones. My art is all encompassing in my mind. I imagine things I would or could do. On an amateur level, I've written blogs, poems, drawn and painted portraits, flowers, sea shores, strove too hard for realism and played with abstract. When I became the sole 24/7 caregiver for my husband 12 years ago in July, I quit my unsatisfying day-job, and was able to focus some on making selling art (I realize now I put too much emphasis on making art to sell). But as Parkinson's rapidly took more and more from my husband, I devoted less and less time to art and everything else except the duty of the moment. He died in July, after 25 years total with the disease, and my 12 years of 24/7 caring among other things to do, has left me to attempt to recover at least some sense of my self and my own priorities. Which I will. I do want to add, that during the time of caregiving for my husband which included more intimacy with another human than anyone would want, I was surprised by a sense of fulfillment which I had never felt before in any other job or activity. Maybe parents can related to this, not having children of my own, to me, caregiving as difficult as it was, provided expression of something beautiful inside me that I didn't know existed. I hope to look for that feeling in my art and in whatever comes next for me. thanks again. Austin