Austin Kleon

Mood

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:11:36 -0500

Mood

Lucy Sante, “A True G, Un Film Tit,” 2017 Lucy Sante on...

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:45:35 -0500

Lucy Sante, “A True G, Un Film Tit,” 2017

Lucy Sante on Collage: ‘You Have to Kill One Thing to Make Another.’

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:17:59 -0500

Matt Berry says “Arizona” in What We Do in the Shadows

Matt Berry says “Arizona” in What We Do in the Shadows

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:16:53 -0500

Matt Berry says “Arizona” in What We Do in the Shadows

Side two of Abbey Road

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:27:21 -0500

Side two of Abbey Road

David Cross on doing his own stunt as Mrs. Featherbottom on Arrested Development

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:25:01 -0600

David Cross on doing his own stunt as Mrs. Featherbottom on Arrested Development

In the Mrs. Featherbottom run, I’m trying to impress Maeby, who’s reading. And I have the thing like Mary Poppins, the umbrella, the parasol, and I’m going to float down and land on my ass. I never got shot out of a cannonball or had to dangle out of a helicopter or anything like that. But I love doing my own stunts. So they literally flew a fuckin’ guy from Seattle, I believe, or Portland to do this stunt. And I was — that’s about as frustrated and angry as I’ve been on any production. “Guys, listen, this makes no sense. You’re going to take an hour to get him dressed up and you’re going to have to cut. This is not going to look good. And you know it. Everybody here knows it.” Well over an hour of pleading. I just wouldn’t back down: This is insane. I can do this. I’ve done this a million times. Without padding, I have jumped from higher places. I’ve been fine. Put the pads below camera, it’s fine. And eventually I got my way. It took way too long for them to fucking acquiesce. This guy had flown in and he had even gotten dressed. The guy went somewhere, and we were like, “Let’s do it now.” And there was a safety meeting and all this bullshit. It was ridiculous.And so we shot it, one take. And the thing you see is what I did. I don’t think landing on the table was a part of it. I think it was supposed to be just sort of landing there. And I kind of made it to the coffee table in my jump. And of course, I break it into a million pieces. And of course it didn’t hurt. I got up, it’s fake glass, it’s breakaway furniture, and I fucking dusted myself off, and we kept shooting.

A blackbird rides a great horned owl - photo by @mattcrossleynature

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:40:57 -0600

A blackbird rides a great horned owl - photo by @mattcrossleynature

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:24:03 -0600

Jake Kennedy, Pin-up Odin, 2025
Hand cut collage, 5 x 5 in.
(via Colle)

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:52:30 -0600

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy, December 28, 1944

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:55:50 -0600

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy, December 28, 1944

Five years ago, a reader emailed me this November 2005 Texas Monthly profile of Austin writer James…

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:42:31 -0600

Five years ago, a reader emailed me this November 2005 Texas Monthly profile of Austin writer James Magnuson and said he had it taped above his desk. Magnuson died this week.

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:12:21 -0600

Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960)

Orwell on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:47:05 -0600

“The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.”

From “The Art of Donald McGill”

Photo by Mark Meth Cohn from The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:17:49 -0600

Photo by Mark Meth Cohn from The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards

Emma Allen on Otto Soglow’s Spot Art | The New YorkerThe New...

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:07:08 -0600

Emma Allen on Otto Soglow’s Spot Art | The New Yorker

The New Yorker doesn’t easily let go of the old stuff….My favorite still functioning relics are two fat binders of “Talk spots”—hundreds of postage-stamp-size drawings that appear at the tops of Talk of the Town pieces, which the cartoonist Otto Soglow drew from 1926 to 1970, to illustrate stories in the section, and which have (mostly) been paired with new Talk pieces ever since.

Closed captions have never heard of Captain Beefheart

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:29:05 -0600

Closed captions have never heard of Captain Beefheart

🦉⚾️

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:09:07 -0500

🦉⚾️

A button from the collection of Paud Hegarty

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 11:32:50 -0500

A button from the collection of Paud Hegarty

Laurie Anderson playing Puppet Motel, her 1995 piece

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:20:42 -0500

Laurie Anderson playing Puppet Motel, her 1995 piece

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 07:48:38 -0500