Just in case you wondered. Meeting her was a turning point in my creative life. And look: here’s a good portrait of her in the New York Times. Everyone go out and buy her new book next week.

Many readers might not be aware, but my wife Meghan is getting her master’s degree in architecture (M.S., not M.Arch, for those who care…). So there’s not just one Kleon in our household who can draw!

Tonight I missed the bus and didn’t make it down to Vizthink, so I hung out with Meg down in the studio. She was using this crazy apparatus to do lettering:

It’s called a pantograph, or “Leroy” (named after the dude who invented it, I’d guess). It’s kind of like a compass: you basically trace a lettering template with a metal point, and the rapidograph pen follows along. I gave it a try…

…and I decided there was no way in hell I’d have the patience to do technical drawing! No thanks!

Dig my woman’s skills, though:

At one point she called me over and said, “Here, this will appeal to your sense of humor.”

She knows me well.

For those of you reading via RSS, pop over to my homepage real quick and check out the new front page and updated portfolio.

Why the change? I’m hoping that the front page will now be a more friendly portal to newcomers.

For those long-time readers, if you want to skip the frontpage and go straight to the blog, update your bookmarks:

http://www.austinkleon.com/blog/

I should also point out that there’s a new subscription options page. If the blog feed isn’t enough for you, you could always upgrade to the Blog + Tumblelog Superfeed!

And for those of you with eagle eyes, you’ll have noticed a (gasp!) shopping cart. Yeah, it’s just a teaser for now, but one of our projects this summer is trying to get some merchandise up for sale. We want to start small with maybe just some mini-poster prints, and then move on to bigger and better things.

A couple questions:

• What’s the most successful way to sell products online? Paypal? Etsy? Ebay?
• What would you like to see sold in my store? Prints of poems? Mini-comics? T-shirts?

If anybody has any advice or comments, please let me hear them!

“Ever had one of those nights where you just couldn’t get drunk?”—Bill Callahan

No, I haven’t.

We got to Bill Callahan’s “secret” show with Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris (both from the band Shearwater) just in time to listen to them warm up during their soundcheck (and snap a picture through the window). Callahan is one of my favorite songwriters, so I was excited to see him again (we saw him a couple years ago in Cleveland).

Jonathan Meiburg opened up with a round of songs on banjo and guitar. Then Callahan came out with Meiburg on guitar and Harris on drums.

Great set. Harris and Meiburg gave the songs a heavy edge—much different than the Cleveland show with a fuller, subtler band (including the fantastic Jim White on drums!)

Setlist:

• Sycamore
• Nothing Rises to Meet Me
• Our Anniversary
• Diamond Dancer
• Say Valley Maker
• Rock Bottom Riser
• Cold Blooded Old Times
• Vessel In Vain
• a new song about birds: “too many birds in one tree…“
• Let Me See The Colts

Encore:

• The Well
• In The Pines

Here’s a four-minute Youtube reel of video clips I shot:

Links:

• Bill Callahan, Retread Session
• Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris, Retread Session #2

Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Why describe it when dozens of reviewers already have:

Bageant mixes a reporter’s keen analysis, a storyteller’s color, and a native son’s love of his roots in this absorbing dissection of America’s working poor. Returning to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, after 30 years of life among the elite journalistic class, Bageant sought to answer the question of why the working poor vote for Republicans in apparent opposition to their own interests. (Booklist)

This is a great book. Like Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, it sets out to explain why democrats just can’t capture the hearts and votes of working class America.

There was a particular passage that I thought synced up nicely with Barack Obama’s recent “race” speech, where Obama said:

As imperfect as [Reverend Wright] may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

The passage from Bageant quote concerns religion, but it has the same theme—your people are your people, and they’re a part of you, no matter what:

Only another liberal raised in a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish circumstance it is — how such a family can despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of Satan, yet still love you and be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. How they can never fail to invite you to the family’s Thanksgiving dinner.

It must be plain that I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually, my family and I may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist. There is talk but no communication. At times it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a sort of high, eerie, mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all yet acknowledged by none.

After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that these are my people — by blood, even if not politically or spiritually. I have prayed with them, mourned with them, and celebrated their weddings. I share their rude tastes and humor, and I am marked by the same fundamentalist God-instilled self-loathing. No matter how much I may change or improve my condition, I cannot escape their pathos. I go forward, yet I remain. I wait anxiously and strive for change, for relief from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art, and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus.

Highly recommended. Thanks to Jessa Crispin for the tip.

Links:

• Buy it on Amazon
• Joe Bageant’s site

Okay, I really hate reviewing books, but I also want to keep track of the good fiction and comics stuff I’ve read lately, so here:

	Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine Not my kind of story, not my kind of style, but a really well-executed, 100-page story. I think Tomine’s a terrific artist, and I love his sketchbooks and illustration work (his New Yorker covers are always great). This book deserves the attention it’s getting. Buy it on Amazon Adrian Tomine’s official site Tasteful PBS segment on the book Tomine on Fresh air — (listen to Terry Gross talk about speech balloons)
	The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd Went to see Chip Kidd talk a couple of weeks ago, so I read his first novel. It’s very funny and a quick read, and anybody who’s been through an art-school critique would appreciate the great classroom scenes. (Kidd modeled the fictional Winter Sorbeck off his own professor at Penn State, the graphic designer Lammy Sommese.) And since so much of the action takes place in the classroom, it sort of functions as a wacky introduction to graphic design. I recommend it. Buy it on Amazon
	Crickets #2 by Sammy Harkham This is a comic book. For $5, you get a bunch of stories, all of them pretty wild and pretty great. Sammy is one of my favorite cartoonists, and I’d been looking forward to this for a while. It didn’t disappoint. Buy it from Drawn + Quarterly Great review by Ken Parille
	Big Questions by Anders Nilsen I’ve been following this series for a while. I found #3 last week in a bargain bin at my local Half Price books—it’s amazing how much Nilsen has grown as an artist. I buy everything he makes, and so should everyone else. Buy from Drawn + Quarterly Anders’ blog Interview My review of Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
	The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch This is bathroom reading: most of the strips are the equivalent of a good dick joke. A good and hilarious dick joke. Buy it from Amazon Read the strip online

I broke down tonight and ordered some business cards from Moo. They’re mini-cards: half the size of regular business cards, with images printed on the front, and contact information printed on the back. You select images from your Flickr account, crop them, and you’re ready to go. I’ll be getting 25 of each of these in a few weeks:

“To reclaim…control over one’s food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing: indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.”—Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

This was an fantastic book that deserves a better map. Oh well.

Earlier today my friend Tim asked, “What is your most naïve question?”

Mine was, “Why do we live like this?” Which, of course, is also a way of asking, “How should we live?”

I loved this book because Michael Pollan answers my question in terms of food: “Why do we eat like this?” and “How should we eat?”

The answer to the latter: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. In an age where food has become nothing but a commodity, something packaged and sold, it’s time to treat it like a gift. “Shake the hand of the one who feeds you,” as Pollan says.

Speaking of great writing about food, I’d like to wish Maureen McHugh a happy birthday! Check out her blog and contributions to Eat Our Brains for some exquisite culinary lit.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

• Seed Magazine » The Listener » As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension
• Wired Magazine » Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain
• The New Yorker » Oliver Sacks » A Neurologist’s Notebook » Music and amnesia
• Oliver Sacks » The Bat Segundo Show

I don’t talk about web design all that much on this blog—probably because it’s what I do at work all day—but for anybody wanting to dip into the subject, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is a simple, straightforward, and classic guide to web usability. I read it when I started my job. (Almost six months ago!) I found these illustrated notes in my desk today, so I thought I’d share…