Austin Kleon - Morning pages (and variations)

Hey y’all,

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

1. Morning pages (and variations).
    
2. After watching the documentary Keith Haring: Street Art Boy, I picked up the beautiful Penguin Classics deluxe edition of his journals. (You can see scans of the journals on Tumblr.)
    
3. The Vampire Test is a simple way to know who or what to let in and out of your life. (An excerpt from my new audiobook.)
    
4. I’ve started a “Bookshelf” category on my blog, where I’ll be writing about some of my favorite books. First up is Blexbolex’s Ballad.
    
5. Writing advice from Chuck Berry and Jeff Tweedy: Nouns and verbs.
    
6. Netflix: I enjoyed Dick Johnson Is Dead, a comic take on family and death by filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. (I somehow missed her first movie, Cameraperson, which weaves together footage from over 25 years of shooting documentaries.)
    
7. Why you haven’t seen the best Christmas special ever. (Never fear, you can watch a pretty good VHS rip of Muppet Family Christmas on Youtube.)
    
8. Ear candy: Lots of year-end Spotify playlists dropping from folks with good taste: Sasha Frere-Jones, The Ross Brothers (check out Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets if you miss going to bars), Teju Cole, and Walter Martin. (Feel free to put my 2020 playlist on shuffle.)
    
9. RIP ambient pioneer Harold Budd. I’ve been enjoying his collaboration with Cocteau Twins, The Moon and the Melodies. (He just released a new record with Robin Guthrie called Another Flower.) There’s a pretty good documentary on Youtube about his collaborations with Brian Eno. 
    
10. A reminder: Quantity leads to quality.