Five Things to Do Indoors This New Year's Weekend

Note: This gorgeous modern oujia board was created by Katy Horan for The Austin Séance.

Last week we recommended five things you could do in the streets and urban wilderness of our culture-riddled environs. Now here's that listicle's mirror twin: five diversions from the doldrums of waiting for 2021 to get the hell off the calendar; five locally based wonderments that can be enjoyed inside one's whatever-the-hell-you-can-barely-afford-to-live-in-these-days.

Five things for your weekend flings, sheltered from sky. In the land of Austin, where the randos lie.

Take That Weird Homes Tour Online

Sure, David and Chelle Neff had to put their business of residential exploration into the ol' pandemic mothballs, and who knows if the curated tours might ever return to their former gallivanting glory in Austin (where they started) and New Orleans and Portland and all? But in running the popular project, those Neffs and their friends recorded and compiled, with images and texts and videos, so much of what's delightful about this city of dreamers and creative mavericks – the angels in the architecture, the deities in domesticity, the weird that we're all exhorted to keep this town suffused with. Suggestion: Stay inside your own home and look into the wildest abodes of local others as you trip your way down this rabbit hole of DIY living. weirdhomestour.com

Stir Up the Spirits With the Austin Séance

Even if you don't believe in ghosts – except for that one time, right? – maybe you still like learning about supposedly supernatural goings-on in this demon-haunted world. Maybe you're interested in what's called the "spirit realm" and the mediums who attempt communication with it. Perhaps a little eldritch mystery provides a needed thrill in your life. That's where Albert Lucio and Jake Cordero of the Austin Séance come in. They look into such phenomena, when they're not busy building snow sculptures for a dead fish or presenting meticulously researched in-person séances around town. They research and they report and, in addition to a quarterly newsletter, their website's got a periodically updated blog – with which you can enjoy getting creeped the hell out. austinseance.com

Practice Shut-In Naturalism

What's growing out there in your yard, if you've a house? What plants lie immediately beyond your apartment's window? What can you see of all that's green and engaged in gambits of phototropism? Also, that odd bug recently buzzing or crawling around your kitchen: What the hell is it, exactly? Now's the time to find out. Take a good, long look, make some notes, then get thee to the internets. Drop descriptive terms into Google or whatever – Austin, tree, oval leaves, silver bark – or Austin, insect, brown, wings, spiky legs – and keep honing those parameters until you've cornered it. Check Wikipedia, pay a visit to iNaturalist, follow a mind-croggling maze of Reddit threads until your eyes glaze over, but find out! Knowledge is power, after all. You think it's too, what, trivial? You know who guest starred as Tony's cousin in that one episode of Who's the Boss? but you don't know the name of the tree you walk by every day, WTF? inaturalist.org

Read Lady Joker

Whether you order it directly from Soho Crime or check it out from the library physically or digitally, this novel by Kaoru Takamura, set in modern times but with roots extending back before World War II, will extend your knowledge of more than you knew existed in the world. Why do a diverse group of men kidnap the CEO of Japan's largest beer company and then simply (it seems at first) let him go days later? What does the company, already unhappily stained by organized crime connections, do in response? What's the police procedure in a case like this? How do the news media and print journalists cover the story? The families and friends of the criminals and cops and reporters and workers involved, directly or tangentially – how are they affected by the event? The one word to best describe this literary achievement newly translated by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell: Comprehensive. Another one: Fascinating. And this doorstop of a book is just Volume 1. "But it's not actually local, Brenner," you say? Citizen, beyond any context, Takamura's Lady Joker is a complex and penetrating look at humanity. We're all local in this arm of the galaxy. Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura, Soho Press, 600 pp., $27.95. sohopress.com

Prep Your 2022 Gallery Visits With the Chronicle

They say that if you make vague resolutions, you're less likely to follow through. So be specific – especially regarding this common vow: "I will visit more art galleries this year." Yeah? Which ones? What kind of art do you prefer? Or do you want to expand your usual parameters of taste? Are you looking for the sort of globally hyped pop-cultural urbanism seen at, say, West Chelsea Contemporary or Ao5? You want the world-class and academically prestigious offerings hoisted for view in the Blanton or the Contemporary Austin? Crave the mostly locally sourced, diverse brilliances of grayDUCK Gallery and Northern-Southern and Davis Gallery and Cloud Tree? The eclectic surprises at Camiba or Prizer Arts & Letters or Co-Lab, the deep art-world flourishes of Lora Reynolds Gallery? Mexic-Arte's cultural troves? Abstract art? Realism? Sculpture? Paint? Photography? Hell, maybe you wanna go with whatever's highlighted in the Chronicle's listings each week or just meander around Canopy for several hours every month. But look into it now, while you've got some free time, and make those plans specific. austinchronicle.com/events/arts/visual-arts