Hey y’all,

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

1. After a month of cosmic nonsense and petty frustrations, my favorite month starts tomorrow! To celebrate, I made a list of my favorite movies for spooky season viewing.
   
   

2. I also made a list of a dozen favorite books I read this summer. (My top 3 favorites: Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, and Craig Brown’s 150 Glimpses of the Beatles.)
   
   

3. The late actor Alan Rickman’s diaries. (Look how beautiful this page is! I hope there are more facsimiles in the book.)
   
   

4. I picked up Paolo Belardi’s Why Architects Still Draw thinking, “Because they still can’t write?” (I’m married to someone who went to architecture school, so making fun of architects is one of our pastimes.) I actually enjoyed the book. Not mind-blowing, but very centrifugal. Gave me a lot of good quotes and good sources to track down. (Thanks to Matt for telling me about it.) If you’re looking for architecture-related books with my highest recommendation, I love Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn and Christopher Alexander + others’ A Pattern Language.
   
   

5. I’m on a good novel streak: after finishing Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, I started Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. On deck is Andrew Sean Greer’s Less Is Lost. (The sequel to Less, which was one of my favorite reads of 2019.)
   
   

6. The new Penguin Classics edition of Conversations With Goethe has a great introduction and features an Andy Warhol on the cover. (The image is a screenprinted crop of a painting by Tischbein.)
   
   

7. Great ambient album I’m listening to on repeat: Nils Frahm’s Music For Animals.
   
   

8. The first episode of World Of Tomorrow is streaming for free on Don Hertzfeldt’s YouTube page. One of my favorite animated films.
   
   

9. RIP to jazz legend Pharaoh Sanders. (His album Promises with Floating Points was one of my absolute favorite records last year.) RIP writer Hilary Mantel. RIP jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis. RIP drummer Anton Fier. RIP record collector Joe Bussard. RIP Coolio.
   
   

10. Watching NASA crash DART into an asteroid in real time was pretty awesome. (If you google it something fun happens.) Cosmic perspective is always good for me.
    

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. The studio is so close to being move-in ready. So, so close. I just need the power company to come out and hook up the electric. Any day now…