Know your exits

In this week's newsletter: collage, journals, typewriters, travel, and more... 

In this week's newsletter: collage, journals, typewriters, travel, and more... View this email in your browser Hey y'all, Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: This week I tore through Tara Westover's memoir, Educated. The book is about many things, but one of them is the power of journals and diaries to help you cope with trauma and keep the facts of your life straight. (Westover has kept a journal since she was 10. "My journals supplied me with a level of detail I could never have had if I relied on memory alone," she says. "I recorded meals I'd eaten, conversations I'd overheard, work I'd done for my father in the junkyard or my mother tincturing herbs.")   The women who invented collage, a writeup of the Cut and Paste show I saw when I was in Edinburgh. (I bought the catalog and another catalog of the wonderful work of Eduardo Paolozzi.)   I saw Bill Callahan in Detroit this week with maybe the best band I've seen him play with. I was particularly taken with the upright bass of producer Brian Beattie, who has some nice writings on his site about playing the bass and recording secrets from Steve Albini. (Beattie is married to Austin artist Valerie Fowler — if you flip to the back of Keep Going you'll see the cardboard sign on their studio door.)   We stopped in Ann Arbor on the way to Detroit and came across a motherlode of pansies, which yielded a dozen more Pansy Luchadores!   One morning in the hotel room I thought I was hallucinating a Clint Eastwood soap opera. Turns out it was just the awful motion smoothing setting on the TV.   How artists have depicted the moon over time. (If you dig that, you might want to flip through the prints in One Hundred Aspects of the Moon and these images from Bernd Brunner's Moon: A Brief History.) Man, I really like looking at the moon...   Now streaming: free, full episodes of the first season of Soul! Holy moly, the guests: James Baldwin, Bill Withers, Al Green, Gladys Knight... it's a treasure trove. (Here's a history of the show.)   I finally saw the documentary California Typewriter. Super charming. (Currently streaming on Kanopy.)   RIP musician João Gilberto. (Ted Gioia wrote about what it was like to see him in concert.)   RIP actor Rip Torn. (He knew his exits. Here's hoping he smelled the Glenlivet on God's breath...) Thanks for reading. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, forward it to someone who'd like it or, even better, buy them a book! If you're seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here. xoxo, Austin Austin Kleon is the author of Steal Like An Artist and other books. Subscribe to this newsletter   Copyright © 2019 Austin Kleon, All rights reserved. My mailing address is: Austin Kleon 19885 Detroit Road Box #222 Rocky River, OH 44116 You're getting this email because you signed up for it at austinkleon.com. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. Amazon Affiliate links offset the cost of sending these missives.