Austin Kleon

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First collages of the year

For closure, my first collage of the year was an ode to my kidney stone.

I made this second one in portrait, but I think I like it better landscape.

Here’s what they look like side-by-side in my diary:

It’s a beautiful evening. I’ve got the screen door open while I scan…

Here are my first collages from last year.

100 things that made my year (2022)

  1. Disneyland with the family. Dole Whip. Hotel room lightsaber battles. Best vacation ever.
  2. Getting my studio built. Graffiting the inside of the walls with the boys before they blew in insulation. The deadbolt lock on the studio bathroom door. Panicking about ever being able to actually make things in there, but then settling in.
  3. Buying a bicycle with my friend Christy and falling in love with riding. Logging over 2,000 miles since February. How social it turns out to be. Getting a biker gang together. (Shout-out to Hank, Greg, Marty, and Gerren.) Getting overtaken by a fixie gang who shouted, “Lend us one of those gears, bro!” How bikers look out for each other when somebody is broken down or has a flat. How riding my bike is a creative act that re-enchants my world. Biking to Bookpeople and Black Pearl for Indie Bookstore Day. Riding downtown on the Shoal Creek trail through Pease. The Hike and Bike trail around Town Lake. The “EMBRACE BEWILDERMENT” sign on the Johnson Creek Greenbelt trail. Braking for armadillos on Walnut Creek. Turtles and gigantic snakes in the 183 retention pond. Teaching myself to draw a bicycle from memory. Learning to fix flat tires and clean chains. Clive Thomspon’s writing on biking. Grant Petersen’s Just Ride and his “Bicycle Sentences” illustrated by Betsy Streeter. (Just made into a journal.) David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries. All the metaphors biking provides: how you need to look where you want to go and how riding up a hill is easier than riding into the wind. A tree I saw growing through an engine block. The hawk on top of the bike sign. How the bike is a machine that makes you feel more human.
  4. Driving the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco through Big Sur and down to LA.
  5. Releasing the 10th anniversary edition of Steal Like An Artist. 
  6. The incredible newsletter community we’re building.
  7. Pool season. The zen of pool maintenance. Anne Enright reading John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” Dragonflies landing on my pencil while I’m marking up a book. Changing music, sending texts, and answering phone calls on my Apple Watch while floating. Even the racoons partying on the sun shelf in the night.
  8. The owls in our back yard. Watching Merlin’s box and Minerva and the owlets. Being on Facebook solely so I can check in with my Central Texas Screech Owl group. Our “two owl” Christmas.
  9. Giuseppe the cactus.
  10. Long walks with Meghan. Doing a loop or a circuit instead of straight out and back.
  11. Driving to Florida in February for our first real vacation since the pandemic. The long bridge that goes over the wild swamps in Louisiana. Staying the night in New Orleans. City Park and the Sculpture Garden. Coffee and Beignets. Soft shell po-boys in Slidell. Buying the kids a new Casio keyboard to play. Swimming in the heated pool. Sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico. (And how most everybody on the beach leaves just after the sun goes down and misses the really beautiful color changing in the sky.) Florida pines.
  12. Drawing and writing with my brush pens in my diary. Mixing inks and making custom CMYK brushes.
  13. A fall trip to Pennsylvania. How good a mood Philly was in after game one of the World Series. Riding an elevator with John Fetterman. Rittenhouse Square. The art museum. Kelly Drive and the foliage. Driving to Lancaster with two hours of Iggy Pop and Brian Eno. The central market and record shopping. An incredible day at Longwood Gardens. How it was so autumnal a leaf fell in my salad. Stopping into the Brandywine Museum of Art and signing all my books they sell in the gift shop. How at the Philly airport rental return, waiting with a huge group of people for the shuttle, I realized I could simply cross the street and enter the terminal.
  14. Taking the kids to see Kraftwerk.
  15. Setting up the music room in my old office, a room I previously hated, which now I love. A full drum set! Amps! Guitars! Keyboards! Jam sessions.
  16. Buying a telecaster.
  17. Trying out a bidet seat, and then asking Meg to install one on every toilet in the house.
  18. Helping Meg build garden beds in the side yard. Watering the garden. Looking for new growth. Proplifting and how “stolen plants always grow.” Going to nurseries, which are often as pretty as a park. Gardening signs. Lots of trips to Lowes. Finding ideas in notebooks like sifting potatoes out of dirt. Thinking about the creative seasons. Judy Mowatt, “The Gardener.” The compost signs in the community garden. The purple cabbages at Shoal Creek Nursery.
  19. The zen of yard work.
  20. “Comfort work”: work you do when you don’t know what else to do.
  21. As your body starts falling apart, the deep satisfaction of repairing things.
  22. Fixing a shower valve with Thor Harris. His albums Bonnie Rides With Us and Doom Dub II.
  23. The absolute rush you get these days from being around someone who’s competent.
  24. Going to my first Austin FC game with Julien. (On sports fandom, see: Roger Angell on “the business of caring.”)
  25. The Snow Cone machine my kids got me for my birthday.
  26. Thinking about my grandmothers and how they let me know who they were.
  27. Doing gigs again. Being out in the world. Meeting people in the signing line again.
  28. Playing chess with Owen. Reading David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess and paging through Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. 
  29. Thinking about how the two hobbies I got into this year — bikes and chess — were hobbies that kept my favorite artists from making art — Kraftwerk and Duchamp, respectively. (Also: How easy it is to mistake “riding” and “writing.”)
  30. Pizza night and a movie with the family. Godzilla! King Kong! Toy Story 2. Pixar’s “Your Friend The Rat.” Mickey Mouse shorts. Angry Birds movies. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. One Hundred and One Dalmations. The Little Mermaid. Tron. Creature from the Black Lagoon. Monsters, Inc. Turning Red. Luca. Coco. Moana. Destroy all Monsters! Ponyo. Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin. The Wizard of Oz. (The autistic boy in Uniquely Human who asks everyone he meets, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”) Owen’s film criticism: “I hate movies with a lesson.”
  31. Watching Bluey and SpongeBob and Gravity Falls with the boys. Jules’ Dipper Hat.
  32. Drawing exquisite corpses with the kids.
  33. Playing Wordle with the kids.
  34. Legos. Jenga.
  35. Duets at the piano. “Lost Woods” and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”
  36. Jamming with Owen on drums.
  37. How it’s easier to read what you don’t want to read to them if you do it in a silly accent.
  38. All the funny things my family members say. How I said, “I don’t have a girlfriend, either, so you and I have something in common,” and Owen replied, “I HATE that we have something in common.” How I told Jules I used to be a librarian and he asked, “Before you got fired?” When Meg said, “I don’t want to wear what I wore in the 90s, I want to wear what I couldn’t get my parents to buy for me to wear in the 90s!”
  39. How Owen reads the NYtimes kids section religiously on the last Sunday of every month.
  40. Khalil Gibran, “On Children.”
  41. The blessing and the curse of school. The total chaos of being a lunch monitor. The adorable valentines the kids brought home from their classmates. How helpful occupational therapy was for Jules. Teaching zine workshops to my sons’ classes: “How to judge a book by its cover” for the fourth graders, and Thanksgiving zines for the second graders. The tenderness of school drop-off. How luxurious it is to have a quiet house, but how good it is to have them safe at home at the end of the day.
  42. Halloween. Watching spooky movies. Rebecca. The Mystery of the Wax Museum. The kids’ inflatable Godzilla and Among Us costumes.
  43. iOS’s “Live Text” function, which seems like magic to me. Discovering the timeline function on Google Street View.
  44. The old Ukrainian woman who offered a Russian soldier sunflower seeds to put in his pockets so flowers would grow when they put him in the ground.
  45. Burnet Road delights. T-Loc’s burritos. Burgers at Billy’s. The bento boxes and onigiri and Aerial cheddar cheese corn snacks I get at the Asahi Japanese grocery. Choo Sando. Bahn mi and crawfish from Le Bleu. The chicken sandwich at Fat City Stacks. The little paper cars the kids’ meals come in at Top Notch. More P. Terry’s than I care to admit. The ever-reliable Taco Deli.
  46. Securing takeout bags on the passenger side with a seatbelt.
  47. Trilobites!
  48. Music, music, music. Big Thief, “Time Escaping.” The Everly Brothers. Steve Lacy, Gemini Rights. Sturgill Simpson, “I Don’t Mind.” Cass McCombs, Heartmind. Phyllis Dillon. Cate Le Bon, Pompeii. Walter Martin, “New Green.” Oren Ambarchi’s Shebang. Patricia Wolf, See-Through. Low, “What Part of Me?” Lou Reed, American Poet. Lower Dens, Nootropics. Bobby Parker, “Watch Your Step.” Prince and the Revolution: The Purple Rain Tour. The Rick James documentary, Bitchin‘. Some Girls: The Stones live in Dallas. Ibibio Sound Machine, Electricity. Albert King, Born Under A Bad Sign. Band of Gypsys. The phaser pedal on 70s country songs. Leonard Cohen on ACL in 1989. Music theory videos on YouTube. Bogdanovich’s 4-hour Tom Petty documentary. Songs for Drella. Thinking about David Berman and songs as shelters in time. My Purple Mountains hat. The best song of 2022: Nadja and Lazlo’s “Who’ll Come First on the Wedding Night?”
  49. Listening to the radio. KUTX. KOOP’s “Jamaican Gold.” How Britt Daniel says he has a room in his house with the radio always on.
  50. Napping to music, letting it sink in subconsciously.
  51. Falling asleep in the hammock.
  52. Staying up too late watching the free music video channels on our TV. How Meg knows all the words to 90s hip-hop. Dying laughing at this performance of “Come On Eileen.”
  53. Going to bed at 9:30.
  54. Playing Minecraft on the Switch with the kids. Mario Kart. Return to Monkey Island.
  55. Reading books in the bathtub.
  56. The Libby app and ebooks from the library.
  57. TV. White Lotus. South Side. Slow Horses. Bad Sisters. Winning Time. Reservation Dogs. Barry. (“You don’t want to be the real you in the wrong way.”) How To With John Wilson. Hacks. Atlanta. Mo. Severance. Tokyo Vice. (“Tell me whyyyy!”) The Righteous Gemstones. Somebody Somewhere. The Offer. The Andy Warhol Diaries. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. (Fictional Lenny Bruce’s advice: “Don’t plan! Work! Just work and keep working.”) George Carlin’s American Dream. What We Do in the Shadows. The Beavis and Butt-Head reboot. The Bear. The Old Man. All Creatures Great and Small. Our Flag Means Death. Dickinson. Better Call Saul. Better Things. Light and Magic. Derry Girls. Grand Designs.
  58. Getting a cheap surround system from Costco.
  59. Movies. Repo Man. (“The two hemispheres are fundamentally at odds.”) Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. Cocteau’s La Belle et le Bete. Prey. Top Gun 2. Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Much Ado About Nothing. Gremlins. Lessons of Darkness. Fire of Love. Roadrunner. Jackass Forever. The Automat. The Wolf of Wall Street. Everything Everywhere All The Time.
  60. Rubbernecking whenever we heard a fender bender at the end of our street. Kids getting stickers from the firefighters.
  61. Taking Jules to the Texas Book Festival, meeting Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, then walking to the skate park to draw.
  62. Mixing cocktails with Campari and Averna. The faux-scientific beakers Ted bought us to freeze/gift cocktails.
  63. Codeine.
  64. Hanging out with my mom and playing Scrabble, drinking whiskey sours, her teaching me how to mend.
  65. Knowing dad shit like how to jump a car, but also how much dad shit you can learn in 5 minutes on YouTube.
  66. Visiting Aaron Pratt at the Ransom Center. The TV/VCR combo and vintage VHS tapes — including Repo Man! —  in his office.
  67. When Matt Bucher brought me a big bag of stationery goodies that included Musgrave 600 NEWS pencils.
  68. Owen turning 10. Meg turning 40. Mom turning 70.
  69. Taking Meg to Clark’s for her 40th birthday and stumbling onto a Lance Lescher show at Stephen Clark Gallery.
  70. My elder millennial friends who like to talk on the phone and my boomer friend who only wants to text.
  71. Looking for better questions instead of easy answers: “And then what?” “Why am I talking?” “Would I do it tomorrow?” “Are you helping?” Editing my books down to only the questions.
  72. Thinking about creative tensions. How resistance is necessary for creative work. Finding energy in the gap between who you are and who you want to be. William James’ idea of “inner heterogeny.” How the writer must be (at least) four people.
  73. Juxtaposing two quotes in my commonplace diary. “The simplest cut.” Lawrence Weschler’s “Taxonomy of Convergences.”
  74. Learning more about Mexican culture. Ex-voto paintings.“Tecnicos y Rudos.” Lourdes Grobet’s Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling.
  75. Anni Albers’ On Weaving. Warp and weft. Making weavings out of Hershey Kisses flumes.
  76. Despite everyone saying that Austin sucks now, finding great little pockets in the city, keeping your friends close, and enjoying how often people you know come through town or visit.
  77. Having your spots. Taking pretty much everyone who visits to Mi Madre’s.
  78. How great the city is on holidays, when everybody clears out, and it’s so quiet.
  79. Thinking about how money can be a stabilizing or a de-stabilizing agent, depending on how much you do or don’t have. How a sign of new wealth coming into a neighborhood is constant ruins. Avoiding affluenza. Stepping off the hedonic treadmill. Being okay with (more than) enough. Re-naming Teslas “Musk Mobiles.”
  80. Trying to get better at interviewing. Interviewing Oliver Burkeman. Sarah Ruhl. Tim Kreider. Grace Farris. Edward Carey.
  81. Kevin Kelly’s advice: “Copying others is a good way to start. Copying yourself is a disappointing way to end.”
  82. Celebrating my favorite writers’ birthdays, like Montaigne and Thoreau.
  83. Splooting squirrels. Squirrels dropping pecans on our metal roof louder than bombs. The mean white squirrel who bullies the other squirrels.
  84. The trilling toads around the house that come out when it rains.
  85. Making collages. Starting from scraps. Letting materials lead. Not knowing what you’re doing. How one thing leads to another.
  86. Being okay with the fact that being a writer is like “having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
  87. A phrase I saw on a vintage can of tomatoes: “Labor and wait.”
  88. Coming to the edge of my map. Knowing that the map is not the territory.
  89. How easy it is not to have an opinion or a comment. How Hanif Abdurraqib says, “My superpower is that I mind my own business.”
  90. Saving my spiraling out for my diary.
  91. Stopping to smell the Mountain Laurel.
  92. Finding new ways to answer the question, “How are you?” Such as: “I’m feeling like a cheeseburger with no cheese” (Owen made that up) or “I am riding in the bike lane on trash day.”
  93. Embracing “dead week” — the no man’s land on the calendar between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
  94. Making a fire in the fireplace. Spending an hour with Owen watching how newspaper burns.
  95. Advice from Mel Brooks: “Say yes and never do it.”
  96. Gossiping with neighbors.
  97. Surviving COVID.
  98. Passing my kidney stone.
  99. Walking away from things that aren’t right.
  100. A clear calendar.

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Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.

Gardening signs

Was going through old photos from the year and came across these funny signs at various nurseries I went to with my wife. Gardening remains so rich in metaphor…

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