Whatever happened

10 things worth sharing + a studio with a view

Hey y’all,

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

1. It has not exactly been smooth going around here, so I’m giving myself over to my elder millennial nostalgia and enjoying Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book and Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, A Movie, An Obsession.
   
   

2. I did not have “write a few thousand words about The Wizard of Oz” on my 2022 bingo card. (Some really great comments from y’all in there.)

   
   

3. I was on Neil Pasricha’s 3 Books podcast and talked about 3 of my formative reads: James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lynda Barry’s What It Is, and the journals of Henry David Thoreau.
   
   

4. My pal Wendy MacNaughton recommended 4 of my favorite books for visual storytelling: Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning, Lynda Barry’s Making Comics, Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty, and her own Meanwhile in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words. For learning to draw “realistically,” I think Betty Edwards’ Drawing on The Right Side of the Brain is a classic for a good reason. For having fun right away with simple drawings, I always push Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make A World. (If you’d like a brand-new example of a bonafide cartoonist attempting an ambitious long-form memoir, check out Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.)
   
   

5. I need to get over to the Blanton Museum’s Paper Vault to see this show of Ellsworth Kelly’s postcards. (Last time I was there looking at a Kelly show, it was with my 5-year-old docent.)
   
   

6. Ear candy: I’ve been on a big Everly Brothers kick. Their debut album is hard to beat — I’m playing it on repeat right now. Blasting a lot of Joe Arroyo by the pool. (More in my 2022 playlist.)
   
   

7. 75 years ago, computer operators found the first actual bug.
   
   

8. Video games: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was one of my favorite games ever, so I cannot wait to play the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. (Curious elder time: My 9-year-old budding composer/video game designer is super into the games of Toby Fox: he’s been playing Deltarune, and learning a bunch of Undertale songs on piano.)
   
   

9. Eye candy: The special effects of Czech animator Karel Zeman. (I need to pick up the Criterion Blu-Ray of Three Fantastic Journeys.) And, I don’t know how I forgot to mention this, but I could not help loving the new Top Gun.
   
   

10. RIP filmmaking legend Jean-Luc Godard, who I quoted in Steal Like an Artist: “It's not where you take things from— it’s where you take them to.”

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. Some folks have told me they’ve been enjoying watching the progress on my studio over on Instagram. The end is getting closer, but we’re still not there — it’s sort of like looking forward to Christmas, if Christmas was supposed to happen two months ago but got postponed indefinitely? Anyways, here’s the above-mentioned 9-year-old enjoying the view from my future writing spot: