Austin Kleon - The work in front of you

Hey y’all,

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

1. Doing the work that’s in front of you.
    
2. I finally picked up my copy of Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality so I could participate in the book discussion going on at The Convivial Society. (I read his book Deschooling Society years ago and it made a big impact.)
    
3. I made another batch of collage houses for Meg. (I’ve been taking inspiration from our morning walks and A Field Guide to American Houses.)
    
4. Anthony Bourdain has been gone for two years now. He was a model of curiosity, and I’m find old episodes of Parts Unknown very comforting right now. I read the slim volume, Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview, which might be worth picking up just for Helen Rosner’s introduction.
    
5. Poems: Su Tung-Po had being a father nailed a thousand years ago, Emily Dickinson on the man she fears, and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet about our modern predicament... written in 1939.
    
6. Ear candy: I’ve had Miles Davis’s Live at the Plugged Nickel on repeat. (Here’s a history of the album.) 
    
7. Eye candy: the collages of Deborah Roberts, online exhibits of collage-based animation and film, and Al Jaffee’s last fold-in for Mad.
    
8. Podcast: The Great Women Artists.
    
9. Documentary: PBS is streaming Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Matt Wolf’s film about the activist who recorded the news for 30 years. (Wolf made another movie about a loner who left behind a huge archive of tapes: Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell.)
    
10. Against the “one-long-slow-idea” book.