Austin Kleon – Page 210

I’ll send you a postcard

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Postcards I sent the boys from the Keep Going tour. (I missed several cities.)

Trimming the Wick

Monday, June 3, 2019

John Wick ran 101 minutes.

I am no film critic, but here is advice to the filmmakers for John Wick 4, which I will undoubtedly see, stolen from a website about candles:

Trimming the Wick will keep the candle burning without any black soot and it will give your candle a longer burn time. Here is what happens when you do not trim the Wick properly: When a Wick gets too long it cannot draw wax all the way up to the top of the wick. Therefore, the Wick itself will start to burn.

(I looked, and Destination Wedding ran only 86 minutes.)

The synthesizer symphony

Sunday, June 2, 2019

A collage from a few weeks ago. My six-year-old liked it so much he demanded it for one of his albums.

A reader mentioned that the piece reminded them of Jack Kirby’s collage work:

Filed under: Sunday collage

Going to church with Chase Jarvis

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Chase Jarvis is one of my very favorite people to talk to, so I was thrilled that he agreed to interview me on the Seattle stop of the Keep Going tour. Here’s the video of our conversation:

The setting was a little different than what we’re both used to: We spoke in the University Temple United Methodist Church, across the street from the University Book Store.

Here’s a photo of the EXIT signs I mention during the talk:

I grew up in a Methodist church, so it brought back all sorts of feelings for me. Singing in the choir. Half-listening to sermons while reading the Bible. Lighting candles on the altar. Meeting my best friend while plonking on an old piano in Sunday school.

I think the setting gave this conversation a different tone than our others. Maybe more pensive. I don’t know.

Here’s our first conversation, from 2013:

Here’s us in 2014, riding around in the back of a car at SXSW:

And here’s our third conversation, from 2016:

Chase always makes it fun. My many thanks to him, his team, the University Book Store, and the great audience who turned out.

A free education that goes on for a lifetime

Friday, May 31, 2019

Here’s Christopher Hitchens:

The great thing about writing a book is that it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already. It’s this dialectical process that makes me glad I chose the profession I did: a free education that goes on for a lifetime.

(Quoted in the “Teach What You Know” chapter of Show Your Work!)