One thing after another

10 things worth sharing this week + 20% off sale

Hey y’all,

To quote Waylon Jennings, “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another one on the way.” 

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

1. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the best thing I’ve seen in the theater in ages. My friend Matt had an extra ticket to see it in IMAX and it just blew me away. I love so many of his movies — especially Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread — but I was still surprised how much I liked this one. Highly recommended.
   
   

2. One Battle After Another was adapted (very loosely) from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. If you’re Pynchon-curious, my pal Alan Jacobs has written a very handy introduction to Pynchon and his books. (“If you just want to get a taste of Pynchonian method and style,” Alan says, The Crying of Lot 49 “remains the place to begin.”)

   
   

3. “I still have trouble reading a book during the day because it somehow feels indulging… You know, like oh, my — this is so naughty,” P.T. Anderson once said. “I’ve sunken into the pleasure of it — to think, my God, I’ve got my life in a way where I can read a book in the middle of the day.” Anderson’s star, Leonardo DiCaprio, prepared for his role by reading Austin writer Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.
   
   

4. “Stay sick! Turn blue!” One more PTA deep cut: PTA’s dad was Ernie Anderson, who, before he became a famous voice actor, hosted a late-night cult horror show in Cleveland called Ghoulardi. My father-in-law wrote a book about it called Ghoulardi: Inside Cleveland TV’s Wildest Ride.
   
   

5. Spooky season listening: We’re in The October Country now, “That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts.” I updated my mixtape to include Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube:

   

6. Spooky season viewing: I really love black and white flicks from the 1930s and 1940s. A great starting point is to just make your way through the old Universal Classic Monster movies: I especially like Island of Lost Souls (1932) and The Black Cat (1934). You can’t go wrong with director James Whale: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). I also really like the movies of producer Val Lewton, especially Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Probably my all-time favorite Halloween movie is Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), which must be seen to be believed. A lot of the really good stuff is from the “pre-code” era: in between the advent of talkies in 1929 and the “Hays Code” of 1934. A lot of these movies go hard and are still pretty shocking: the original King Kong (1933) is a great example. Hitchcock works for spooky season, too: I really love Rebecca (1940) and Strangers on a Train (1951). To keep it lighter, check out I Married A Witch (1942) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).
   
   

7. I finally got my hands on Cate Le Bon’s great new record, Michelangelo Dying, but only after this failed attempt:

   

8. A fine motto from Hallie Bateman: “doing bad, drawing anyway.” (I was a big fan of Hallie’s old newsletter, Pen Parade, so I loved this return to the form.)
   
   

9. What I do when I finish (and start a new) notebook. (My silly notebook rituals involve a Posca Paint Marker, a chunky Zequenz flexible notebook, a self-adhesive library pocket, a checkout card, a date stamp, a few DIY self-inking stamps, a UHU glue stick, a Lamy Safari fountain pen, a Pentel Sign Pen, and my magical brush pen.)
   
   

10. Some good creative advice from the Bhagavad Gita: “It is better to do your own duty / badly than to perfectly do / another’s….” 

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xoxo,

Austin

P.S. A peek at the “guardian spirits” in my latest diary: