- After angsting for a few years over whether I’d ever write another book again, giving the “How To Keep Going” talk in March and spending the rest of the year turning it into my next book.
- Getting a real telescope for my 35th birthday. Seeing the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter with my own eyes.
- Watching my youngest son draw. My wife embroidering his accident.
- Putting together a plug-and-play studio for my oldest son. His amazing jam, “Loveheart.”
- So much Kraftwerk. Buying the 3-D Catalogue set for the kids. Kraftwerk in the studio. Kraftwerk in space. Early Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk fan art. Kraftwerk mixes. Even Kraftwerk covers, like The Balanescu Quartet’s Possessed and Senor Coconut’s El Baile Aleman.
- The Lang Stuttering Institute at The University of Texas. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure.
- Visiting Los Angeles the weekend before Malibu burned. Driving the PCH in a stupidly large rental car. Walking El Matador beach. Finding a “correct” Mexican dive next to the Cheesecake Factory in Pasadena with Mike Lowery. Driving the 134 west from Pasadena when Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day” came on 93.5 KDAY. Walking around Los Feliz at night with a strawberry ice cream cone. Hiking to the observatory in Griffith Park with the Flynns. Touring the Corita Art Center. The menu at The Best Fish Taco in Ensenada. Reading Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood on the flight back. Listening to 2Pac’s “To Live & Die In L.A.” for a month afterwards.
- The Bill Callahan show at the Austin Public Library.
- Library tourism. The Chattanooga Public Library. The Eastham Public Library on Cape Cod.
- Driving the 6A through Cape Cod to Provincetown. Clam strips. Lobster rolls. Clam chowder. Taking the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and running into an old Austin friend in the bookstore.
- Listening to Prince’s Piano & a Microphone 1983 while doing the dishes and pretending he was playing for me in the next room.
- Sonia Harris’s ginger, lemon and maple syrup tea.
- Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy strips.
- San Francisco. Burritos in the Mission. Driving the PCH. The boys chasing birds on Rodeo Beach in The Headlands. Celebrating Jules’ 3rd birthday at Presidio Bowl.
- Abandoning the notion of linear progress. Creativity as a spiral. Creativity as a renewable energy. James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. Giving up on genius. Not being a noun, but doing a verb. Not discarding anything of myself. Wearing many hats. Replacing that dreaded question, “So what’s next for you?” with another question: “What do you want to learn?” Shooting the arrows, then drawing the bullseye.
- Thinking of the studio as a garden where ideas grow.
- Hot plates. Dart Bowl enchiladas. Torchy’s queso almost every time I came home from the airport. Ramen Tatsu-Ya. Takeout from Maudie’s.
- Eating Gus’s Fried Chicken with Drew Dernavich during SXSW, then walking all the way home through the greenbelt while talking to my dad on the phone.
- That shopping center at Airport and North Lamar — eating at the revolving sushi bar, shopping next door at Kinokuniya, having dessert at 85C Bakery.
- Cheap pies from the grocery store.
- Drinking boulevardiers. Baileys on ice.
- My wife’s St. Patrick’s Day feast with corned beef, red cabbage, and soda bread.
- Watching Coco with the boys.
- Seeing Phantom Thread in an empty theater in suburban Baltimore. Watching it at least 3 more times throughout the year, and it getting weirder and funnier each time. Listening to Jonny Greenwood’s wonderful soundtrack.
- Pusha T, Daytona. The Beatles vs. Wu-Tang Clan. DOOM XMAS.
- This Here is Bobby Timmons.
- Every time I got to hip someone to Kenneth Koch’s “You want a social life with friends.”
- Looking for like-hearted people vs. like-minded people.
- Not thinking about my life after dinnertime.
- Making collages. Robots from the Restoration Hardware catalog. Comics from my son’s Peanuts calendar. Swapping speech balloons.
- Re-thinking art as a process of falling in love with your material. Letting the materials tell you what they want to be.
- Giving it five minutes. Doing a 30-second fact check.
- Thinking of the blog as a refrigerator and thoughts as nest eggs.
- “…and some sausages!”
- Having a bag of tricks for getting writing done. Willing to be bad. Playing with blocks when I’m blocked. Pulling cards when I’m stuck. Starting a project with a new banker’s box. Opening a fresh pack of index cards and pushing them around. Hanging a bulletin board above my desk with pictures of my heroes. Pressing the sleep timer on my clock radio. Smoking a fake cigarette pencil. Knowing that first draft doesn’t have to be good, it just has to exist. Remembering that beautiful things grow out of shit. That you don’t drive ideas, they drive you. Scooping up the residue of the process. Procrastinating. Wearing clothes with pockets.
- Interviewing Mac and Laura from Superchunk.
- Having breakfast with The Dead Milkmen.
- Visiting Valerie Fowler and Brian Beattie’s studio.
- The creative magic of diner booths and mundane retail spaces.
- Hanging out with my boys in the studio. Taking them to work. Taking them to the art museum. My oldest’s amazing zines, like “How To Make Your Life Go On Forever.” Making fart collages. My youngest’s incredible drawings and his sweet singing voice. Having the boys draw side by side. Making art out of bugs. Thinking about how being a parent is like being an artist. Drawing all the ridiculous things they say.
- Drawing this diagram to explain complexity and how families grow.
- Real wealth.
- Pop-Up Magazine at Hogg Auditorium.
- Delivering a new talk, “Creative is not a Noun,” during the Scratch Conference at the MIT Media Lab.
- Marvin Gaye rehearsing “I Want You” while lying down on a couch.
- David Marchese’s interviews. This interview with Jaron Lanier. This interview with Kate Bush in 2005. Kevin Shields showing off his guitars. Desert Island Discs with Sister Wendy.
- The ease of Spotify playlists. The Blitz Club. The Atlanta Soundtrack. Songs from every year, 1925-2018. A mix for restaurants. My 2018 songs.
- David Sedaris’s Calypso.
- Parquet Courts, Wide Awake!
- Drag City records on streaming services.
- Reading music books to take my mind off writing. Duane Tudahl’s Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions. Lizzie Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom. Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach. Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music.
- Non-fiction written by poets. Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy. Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
- Songs that make me want to break down and keep going at the same time. Jonathan Richman, “The Morning of Our Lives.” Wire’s “Outdoor Miner.” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.” Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “On and On.” Schumann’s “Traumerei.” Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer.”
- Keeping a diary every day of the week for over two years. Cheerful retrospection. (The why and the how.) Reading diaries, especially visual ones, and especially on the day of the year they were written. Thoreau’s journal. Tape for the Turn of the Year. The Assassin’s Cloak. The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. Eleanor Davis’s You & a Bike & a Road. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies. Heidi Julavits’ diary, The Folded Clock.
- My oldest starting a diary, only it was just stuff I say that he doesn’t like.
- Re-reading James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me and getting mad as hell.
- Voting.
- Iggy Pop’s cockatoo.
- Feeding off the trolls and feeling sorry for them. Making an enemy of envy.
- Celebrating my sixth Father’s Day. Remembering that children try out every single emotion on you first. Remembering that it’s not a vacation with kids along, it’s a trip.
- Having something to look forward to. Even a bowl of soup.
- Walking, walking, and more walking. Frederic Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Garnette Cadogan’s essays, “Walking While Black” and “Due North,” Thich Nhat Hahn’s How To Walk. Taneda Santoka’s little book of diaries and haiku, For All My Walking.
- Randomly coming across Rick Steves’ wonderful lecture, “Travel As A Political Act,” on PBS late at night.
- Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland.
- Comedian Nate Bargatze at Hilarities.
- Dreaming up a sitcom about a Millennial Thoreau.
- Worrying less about getting things done and more about things worth doing. Learning for learning’s sake. Trying to be worthy of my life. Remembering my heroes. Trying to find better images. Having no time for despair. Being the light or reflecting it. Staying alive and getting weird.
- Checking in with death. Learning from the leaves. Remembering that “now is the envy of all of the dead.”
- Surviving the dark days. Taping this Mary Karr poem on the fridge: “Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.”
- Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
- Art. Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin. Ed Ruscha at the Ransom Center. Jerry Saltz’s life as a failed artist and 33 rules for being an artist. David Lynch: The Art Life. Agnes Martin, Paintings, Drawings, Remembrances. Chris Ware’s Monograph. John Berger, Confabulations. Agnés Varda and JR’s Faces Places.
- Having a good old-fashioned hobby. Knitting at the end of the world. Working hard at play. Working hard at making it not feel like work.
- Looking at maps. (While knowing there is no map.)
- Paying attention. Looking at stains on the wall. Seeing by turning things upside down. Reading right to left. Seeing moons in pancakes and galaxies in coffee grounds. Looking at the world one piece at a time. Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Making your own connections. Listening closely.
- Keeping up the weekly newsletter and (trying) to keep up with all the good newsletters out there. Audrey Water’s HEWN. Matthew Ogle’s Pome. Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press. Warren Ellis’s Orbital Operations. Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files.
- Reading good fiction before bed. Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Melville’s “Bartleby The Scrivener.” Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Edward Carey, Little. (And seeing his show at the Austin Public Library.)
- Becoming a fan of writers on Twitter before I even read their books — people like @EmilyRCWilson and @TedGioia.
- Hanging out with friends in Chicago and Evanston. Walking along Lake Michigan. Finally meeting Matt Thomas and having lunch at Lou Mitchell’s.
- Being in publishing for a decade and having a million copies in print.
- No line at the barbershop.
- Getting my photo taken by Clayton Cubitt.
- Re-watching favorite movies. Jaws (in July, before flying to Cape Cod). The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Stop Making Sense. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Top Gun. Heat. Much Ado About Nothing. When Harry Met Sally. The Terminator. The Birdcage.
- Making The Last Waltz a Thanksgiving tradition.
- Last-minute trip to NYC. Sunset in Battery Park then walking for hours afterwards. Stuffing my bag with bagels from Russ & Daughters and Pastrami sandwiches from Katz’s for the plane ride home. (Get two. Always get two.)
- Wandering the grounds of Laguna Gloria after taking my son to art lessons. Seeing the peacocks.
- The remixes of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s and The White Album.
- A photograph of Paul McCartney moving his own microphone.
- Music to write to. Bach. Brahms. Mary Lattimore, Hundreds of Days. Chilly Gonzales, Solo Piano III.
- Remembering that I don’t have to live in public. Thinking about what can be lost when we share what we love.
- Watchin’ teevee. Atlanta: Robbin’ Season. Better Call Saul. Queer Eye. The Defiant Ones. Ali Wong’s Hard Knock Wife. Grand Designs. Billions.
- Nacho Libre.
- Luke Pearson’s Hilda books.
- Horace’s Epistles.
- Watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. Reading Kitchen Confidential. Giving him the last words in Keep Going.
- Taika Waititi’s movies: Boy, What We Do In The Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor…
- Thinking about how paper is a great technology.
- Hanging out with Alan Jacobs at Magnolia in Waco on a long drive north.
- Our trip to Cleveland.
- Building driftwood sculptures with the boys on the beach.
- Watching the sun set over Lake Erie.
Search Results for: sally mann
100 things that made my year (2017)
Suggested accompaniment: my 2017 playlist on shuffle play
- Taking a walk every morning because the demons hate fresh air.
- Driving the California coast from San Diego to San Francisco.
- Going back to Italy. Walking around Milan and Turin to Cannonball Adderly’s Somethin’ Else.
- Antigua, Guatemala.
- Austin’s new central library. Walking there from my house through the greenbelt.
- Watching the solar eclipse in the courtyard of the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Lake Michigan in the summer. The lookout at Arcadia. Sleeping Bear Dunes. The S.S. Badger.
- Keeping a good old-fashioned diary. Holding my tongue and loosening my pen. Having a good place to have bad ideas. Taping guardian spirits inside the front cover. Re-reading.
- Reading diaries. Thoreau, daily. Kafka. Kaethe Kollwitz. Andy Warhol. David Sedaris.
- DJing a one-hour set for KUTX.
- Getting more and more into to classical music. Taking my son to free concerts around town. Playing Schumann and Bach on piano. Listening to KMFA. Max Richter’s recomposed Four Seasons. Michael Torke’s saxophone quartet, “July.” Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirit. Stories about Beethoven. Drawing comics about Brahms.
- Looking at the moon. Knowing what moon phase it is based on how shitty I feel. Using Sky Guide to find constellations. 100 Aspects of the Moon. The lunar Rashomon collage chapter in Lincoln In The Bardo. Mary Ruefle’s essay on poets and the moon in Madness, Rack, and Honey.
- Thinking about seasons.
- Glueing one thing to another. Finding the simplest cut.
- Hannah Höch.
- Lance Letscher.
- Being lazy. Taking naps. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers. The song “Hallelujah, I’m A Bum!” Raymond Carver’s “Loafing.” Manifesto of the idle parent.
- Buying a huge 4K TV at Costco for the bedroom and watching too much television. Binge-watching The Good Place, Halt and Catch Fire, Detectorists, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Catastrophe, and Grand Designs. Watching bad cable movies on the Roku channel.
- Killing whole afternoons with 17776 and Universal Paperclips.
- Going to Clark’s on a date with my wife and ordering affogato and then watching every other couple copy us.
- Common Sense Media.
- Listening to good podcast miniseries while working out, like Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect and Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing.
- The digitized Corita Kent archives. Getting her GO SLO poster for Christmas.
- Accepting that nobody knows what’s gonna happen and working without hope and without despair.
- Chuck Berry (RIP) reciting Theodore Tilton’s poem, “Even This Shall Pass Away.”
- Not waking up to the news. Not arguing with strangers on the internet. Staying out of the shitstream. Logging off. Not paying for wi-fi. (“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you.”)
- Bill Withers on why he walked away the music business.
- Library extension.
- My paper dictionary.
- An “organ donor” in our neighborhood giving us an old Hammond for the music room.
- A neighbor giving my wife a whole case of ginger beer and drinking Moscow Mules all summer.
- Saying I could read 10,000 words on Raffi, then finding Sheila Heti’s profile. Listening to “Bananaphone” on repeat until slaphappy.
- Perfume Genius’s “Queen” and No Shape.
- Walt Whitman.
- Lao Tzu.
- X’s More Fun In The New World.
- Gang of Four, Solid Gold.
- Buying a Rolodex at Goodwill for $2.
- Warren Craghead’s Trump drawings.
- Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers.
- Old George Carlin specials. Jammin’ in New York.
- Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne.
- Doing something that will outlast them.
- Eating perfect chicken fingers on the beach in Grand Cayman.
- $7 Tex-Mex lunch specials. City Of Gold. Molly Savage’s Costco food court painting. “The Case for Bad Coffee” and “In Praise of Ugly Food” from Best Food Writing 2016. Stories about Olive Garden.
- Valentina’s Tex-Mex BBQ.
- Sitting in a booth at Jim’s on 71.
- The new Reese’s peanut butter cups with Reese’s Pieces in them.
- Cup of Calm tea.
- Eating clam chowder at the Legal Seafood bar in the Philadelphia airport.
- Hong Ting’s “The Fisherman’s Song at Dusk.”
- Denis Johnson (RIP) on homeschooling his kids.
- My friend Laura, saying, “Take it year by year, kid by kid.”
- Learning how to learn again. Making lists of what I want to learn. Studying something you love in depth.
- Art with the kids. Drawing skeletons. Orchestrated drawings. Raising surrealists.
- Getting permission from Nina Katchadourian’s show Curiouser at the Blanton.
- Soul music. Sam & Dave’s “Soothe Me.” The Impressions’ “Keep On Pushin’.” D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Al Green doing “Here I Am” on Soul Train. Sam and Dave on German TV in 1967. James Gadson’s drumming for Bill Withers.
- Bill Knott’s short poems. (And bonus poems.)
- Jackie Shane’s motto, explained during her monologue on “Money,” on Any Other Way: “Do what you want, but know what you’re doing.”
- Discovering Walter Murch and In The Blink of an Eye.
- Watching old Val Lewton horror movies on Filmstruck.
- Blogging every day since October 1st.
- Paper.
- Laura Walls’ biography of Thoreau.
- Getting a new stereo and CD player. Discovering how amazing CDs sound after streaming for so many years.
- Going to End of An Ear with my son and buying him Kraftwerk and LCD Soundsystem CDs.
- David Rakoff’s Half Empty and his rant about Rent.
- Tidying up here and there, but also embracing mess.
- Slowing down.
- The harp of Mary Lattimore. (And her Instagram.)
- Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen really loud in the car. (Emotion and “Cut To The Feeling.”)
- Books about exploring. Thoreau, again. John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic. Keri Smith’s The Wander Society. Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost.
- Apocalyptic songs. William Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb.” (RIP.) Sonny and The Sunsets’ “Dark Corners.” Tubeway Army’s “Are Friends Electric?” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.”
- Watching movies in the theater. Blade Runner 2049. Paterson. The Last Jedi. Baby Driver. Singin’ in the Rain.
- Watching movies in bed. Get Out. The Handmaiden. The Lobster. Time Bandits. The Thin Man. My Man Godfrey. In Order of Disappearance. The Limey. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Christmas in Connecticut.
- Re-watching old favorites. Moonstruck. Lebowski. Only Lovers Left Alive. The Apartment. Heat. Groundhog Day. It Happened One Night. Young Frankenstein. Coming To America. When Harry Met Sally. Magic Mike XXL. Royal Tenenbaums. Creed. John Wick!
- Starting a fight club with my recycle bin.
- Seeing coyotes and roadrunners on our morning walks. The legend of Steve.
- The pilot at the Atlanta airport who went out of his way to show me an art installation.
- Not telling people how it’s done. John Cage’s parable about not teaching.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay reading “Recuerdo.”
- James Patterson blurbing himself.
- How Esther Pearl Watson paints her characters nude before adding clothes.
- Tana Hoban’s books about signs and symbols.
- Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s “You May Want To Marry My Husband.” (RIP) Her daughter Paris’s Instagram. Paying attention to what you pay attention to.
- Seeing friends during SXSW and the Texas Book Festival.
- Drawing comics on the iPad Pro.
- Getting to read great books before they’re released. Alan Jacob’s How To Think. Tim Kreider’s I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.
- Having a weekly library routine. Going to Miss Monica’s story times at the Hampton Branch at Oak Hill with the kids and hitting P. Terry’s after.
- All the funny things my oldest son said. “Your skin keeps your bones from getting dirty!” At the pool: “She wouldn’t talk to me… She must not have any teeth!” At the playground, a kid told him that Jesus was dead, and he said, “So is Beethoven!” Playing him Ray Charles: “Papa, This is making me dance!” Referring to bowling as “pinball.” Seeing our monogrammed towels: “K is for Kraftwerk!” The time he called Leonard Bernstein “Bernie Einstein.” Shouting in frustration, “Who in the world made this stupid screwdriver?? It says ‘Made In China’ but it doesn’t say who made it!!!” The time he walked in on me watching Blade Runner, and he saw Deckard eating with chopsticks, and he said, “That guy is KNITTING HIS NOODLES!” Seeing snow: “I like how snow looks in real life!” The time I told him I thought he’d like marionettes, and he said, “Does she know a lot about bones?”
- My two-year-old conducting Beethoven.
- Silence. Sleeping with an eye mask and ear plugs.
- Teaching myself, finally, to solder. Soldering broken toy electronics back together.
- Recording songs on my old Tascam 4-track with my five-year-old, with titles like “Skeleton Girlfriend” and “I Don’t Want To Be Dead (Like Beethoven Is Dead)”
- An epic 30-minute UNO game with my wife.
- Drinking champagne on ice in a pint glass.
- A bowl of cereal when you can’t sleep.
- Getting up in the night to take a pee and looking out the bathroom window at the moonlit backyard.
- Giving it five minutes. Changing my mind.
- Reading books.
Previous years here.