Hey y’all,

I left the house, ventured out into the world… and finally caught the plague. Been isolating in bed for days. Glad to be vaccinated.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. Abortion is health care and I believe access to health care is the most important issue for American artists. I have no useful ideas of my own about what to do now, but two ideas from others: 1) “There are many organizations that have been working on reproductive health for a long time…. Instead of trying to solve such a vast and systemic problem on one’s own, the most effective thing we can do is join and support those organizations.” 2) “If I’m writing my book… that means on some level I believe in a future where this book could exist.”
   
   

2. It was a great week to finish Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, as that masterpiece is looking more and more like a documentary.
   
   

3. We took the kids to see Kraftwerk and the show was even better than I thought it would be. My kids have been listening to Kraftwerk since they were really little — in many ways, their music is perfect for young ones: Repetitive beats, simple melodies, and they sing about real things in the world, like cars and radios and trains and robots and bicycles! If you can’t get out to see them, I recommend the blu-ray of Kraftwerk 3-D: The Catalogue. (I have half a dozen books about the band, but bought two new-ish ones: Uwe Schütte’s Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany and Steve Tupai Francis’s 33 1/3 entry about my favorite album of theirs, Kraftwerk: Computer World.)
   
   

4. My friend Julien and I biked to an Austin FC soccer match and it was so much fun, mostly thanks to the great design of the Q2 Stadium (they have a bicycle valet!) and the wild party atmosphere of La Murga De Austin. (I know very little about the game, so I was inspired to dig out my copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow.)

   
   

5. I enjoyed cartoonist Zach Weinersmith’s very funny and very brief book about scientific reductionism, Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Uselessness. (Found via Julian Gough’s newsletter.)
   
   

6. Daniel Clowes’ The Complete Eightball is exactly what I want in a comics reissue: no editing or re-arranging of storylines, just the original issues bound together in a fancy package. I’m delighted to find out that the first fifty issues of Love and Rockets are about to get the same kind of treatment.
   
   

7. Sick bed listening: See-Through, an ambient gem by Patricia Wolf. (Found via What’s Good.)
   
   

8. Sick bed watching: the wonderfully stupid Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe. Perfect for the COVID brain fog.
   
   

9. Eye candy: Agnes Giberne's 1898 book, The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars.
   
   

10. Collage problems? I’ve got ‘em.

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Back to bed.

xoxo,

Austin