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The last couple evenings I sat in bed for hours and read.

My bedroom is minimal, a little embarrassingly so. A mattress on the floor without a headboard. A single nightstand that’s an upside down IKEA basket that’s not sturdy enough for a glass of water, so I lay down a hardcover book as a pseudo-tray. Some pillows behind my back prop me up.

Hobbes curled up beside me, snoring little snores, and I sit here enjoying the thoughts of others from years before.

I’m supposed to plan a trip this month — can I somehow get into Japan finally? — but instead all I think is, “I want to sit here and read and never go anywhere ever again.“

This binge it’s been a lot of Pete D and rachelbythebay. Both are sort of ornery and blunt and nerdy and it’s perfect for me right now. I’ve been keeping daily notes from my readings, sort of like a commonplace book, and using Notion pages split up by month. It’s the most organized I’ve been when it comes to my daily reading habits.

A taste, from “The Six Pillars For Surviving in Computer Times” written in 2014 — almost a decade ago now:

We’ve already seen the likes of cave times, tribal times, village times, empire times […] Computer Times are just the next in a long series. The transition is underway. You can feel it. And it might seem scary and bad and mean and unfair but it’s in no way and under no circumstances optional. It’s happening. […] In this period of transition, your only recourse is to spend every single fucking evening and weekend compensating for your pathetically inadequate schooling in the following ways. It’s this or the soup kitchen:”

I find this kind of stuff oddly refreshing.

Back in my early 20’s I read voraciously. Each evening after work I’d get in my brown comfy goodwill recliner ($25, minimal stains, didn’t quite fit in my Ford Escort Wagon), pick up a book and read for a solid 3–4 hours.

An old boss told me, “Keep reading while you can, it goes away once you have a family.”

Well, maybe I got around that by not having a family.

And yet… I’ve still regressed into reading less.

I haven’t read anything of significance lately — nothing truly life changing. I fall asleep to audiobooks but if I’m honest it’s almost always the same one: The Stormlight Archive (sometimes known as The Way of Kings, and it’s so good I’m in my third re-read and it will definitely be a TV hit show someday).

But I always find a new writer who grabs my attention, and I dive in, and keep diving until my life is changed or something else distracts me and I’ll forget to read for weeks again.

It’s been a weird and intense week.

I spent hours working with lawyers to prepare pages upon pages of documents for an investment Blue Kazoo is taking on. Adding a partner who would be investing and also working in the business is something I’ve never done before… an opportunity for growth. And pain.

My parents bought a hundred acres in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. An hour from civilization. They love it. To me it sounds like a lot of sticks to pick up.

At the same time, I closed on a house in Florida that I bought as a short sale in 2008. It took 6 months to fix it up after the renters trashed it. My mom told them they should bring their church group over to see what they did to the place. The house symbolized my marriage falling apart, so… good riddance?

One of Brainjolt’s key partners changed their revenue sharing terms without notice. Just… bam, this is the new way or else. So many power games. When they’re a BigMegaCorp and you’re a koi in their pond, you do your best but there’s only so much you can do. Pivoting is in our DNA, but after a while it wears you down.

I attended an experimental theater where audience members talked about abortions they’ve had and orgasms they’ve faked. The willingness of strangers in an audience to air their private lives in such a public way was wonderfully uncomfortable… especially when an argument broke out!

Interrobang, my new venture fund, minted its first NFTs while I was standing in a security line at the LA passport office that wrapped outside around the building. Maybe it really is possible to have it all?

We made an offer to invest in a company of someone we randomly met at Art Basel in Miami last year.

And finally, I wrapped up the week by telling men older than me that I was disappointed in them, and to do better.

It made me wonder if I’ve become my father…

But I think I’m just becoming more myself.

// Josh

Weekly Meanderings

🍁 Japan’s 72 Poetic Micro-Seasons. I love the idea of micro-season themes. Four seasons is so boring — why not have 72? Give me “Bush warblers start singing in the mountains (Feb 9th — 13th)” and “Silkworms start feasting on mulberry leaves (May 21st -25th)” and “Crickets chirp around the door (October 18th — 22nd)”

🏡 Fill your home with the weird stuff. “The stuff that makes people say, What is that? Buy the stuff that makes your home the best estate sale when you die.” Who will buy my portable camp recliner that I bring from room to room for Hobbes when I die??

📡 Wow! signal. “It remains the strongest candidate for an extraterrestrial radio transmission ever detected.” The chances of extraterrestrial life are either enormous or nil, and as far as I can tell we have no evidence for either positions, but it’s still cool to have Wow! moments.

🧑‍🚀 The Case for Quantum Change. I don’t normally recommend hedge fund letters, but this one by Eric Peters is pretty good. Two things that stuck out:

• “Change is the great constant in human existence. And yet, for reasons we will perhaps never fully understand, we seek its opposite — stability — a state that does not exist. In fact, stability is the one thing we cannot have no matter how hard we strive to secure it. All we can hope to attain is the illusion, so we conjure it, and shelter within. Even still, change finds us, we cannot escape.”
• “The most important thing to internalize when constructing portfolios for the coming years is that we have entered the most uncertain period of our lifetimes. It is even possible we are at the dawn of the period of greatest change for the past few centuries.”

🍎 I mortgaged my future with a Mac (rachelbythebay, 2013). Even though this is now 10 years old it still resonates with me — I moved everything to the Apple ecosystem almost two decades ago, and though I don’t (usually) regret it, it does entrench you. She says:

• “Instead of staying with my wonky-but-free ways of doing things, I shifted all of my stuff over to the Mac. It gladly embraced all of it and jealously took it in, never to give it back. Now when I want to get back out, I have to do all of the work I thought I had managed to avoid by using a Mac in the first place.”

PS: This week is “Dew glistens white on grass (September 8th — 12th)”

PPS: Speaking of Art Basel, here’s a sketch Abraham drew of me while we were hanging out in the airbnb listening to the sound of air conditioners in a Florida winter:

PPPS: I wanted to buy this piece so bad but unfortunately, they told me it cost Money.

PPPPS: And this made me mad… with jealousy. So simple. UGH!

PPPPPS: But the highest art was the cat memorial I found while walking. RIP Manny.

-J

(This was originally posted to my newsletter subscribers. If you want to read it earlier, subscribe over there!)

// Spewed a lot of words on this one so I’m skipping Weekly Meanderings this week (sorry Tom!), but if you want one hit reply and I’ll send you something :)

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I am disturbingly bad at art.

As far back as I remember I’ve never been able to draw anything that wasn’t a stick figure.

I’ve tried so many times on so many different mediums and failed.

Is there an art gene? Am I missing it?

And yet I keep trying. I’ve taken drawing classes. I once tried to make my own comic based on tracing Calvin and Hobbes. LITERALLY TRACING. I am bad at… tracing? How is that possible?

Since I’m more of a nerd guy than a paper and pen guy, I learned Processing and P5.js to make generative art. Still bad.

When I got my Apple Pencil I learned procreate and started playing with it.

Perhaps an Apple Pencil can erase the bad art gene?

I brought the pencil with me when Abraham and I went to Seattle… I’m trying to remember what we were there for… I think we were just hanging out and thinking together. We always come up with fun ideas when we hang out. (That trip, he also made me throw away my hat.)

The Worst Museum Idea Yet

This trip it was the Bad Art Museum.

We wanted to buy the worst art we found and put it in a museum. The joke was the art that I liked, Abraham hated, and art that he liked, I hated.

So in the end, the museum would be filled with things we both like, but only half.

This eventually morphed into the Museum of Tax Deductible Art, which I still think is funny, because as far as I can tell art collecting is basically a bunch of rich people buying pictures to save money on taxes.

Back to Seattle. We were staying in this fun Victorian-like Airbnb on the outskirts of Queen Anne and I was showing Abraham Procreate and we were taking turns passing the iPad back-and-forth at 11pm while sipping some kind of nasty peaty scotch that he likes and I abhor.

I was getting frustrated at how bad I was, and Abraham kept saying “Don’t worry about it, just put down some strokes, then paint over it, see what it develops into.”

That has stuck with me over the years, because I’m a perfectionist and the concept of just putting things there until something emerges isn’t in my psyche. I want first time perfection. Of course that’s ridiculous, even these words I know I will need to revise.

I long for a concept — perfection — that doesn’t exist and is super unhealthy for creativity.

It’s like what is said about Western vs Eastern art. In Western Art, you start with a blank page. In Eastern art, you start with a block of marble and chip away.

A blank page is tyrannical.

But now something finally exists that may override my bad art gene.

AI art:

DALL-E, Midjourney, Dreamstudio, there are many emerging.

I spent the last week playing with some of these tools and… it awoke something in me. (Am I moving from the Suck to… Machine?)

The ability to type a thought and have an image emerge — and not just an image but a remarkable one — is amazing.

We’re on a huge tipping point.

Not just in art, but in everything, because AI is ALMOST there.

My Tesla can drive itself… Almost.

Siri can understand what I say… Almost.

An image can be created from text… Almost.

We are swimming in almosts.

Almosts can be awkward. My car pilots itself down the interstate at 70 miles an hour, yet the wipers can’t figure out if it’s raining.

DALL-E can produce incredible images… but also some terrifying ones like this and this and this.

It’s fun to point out all the errors.

But the truth is, our world is about to change.

A tool like DALL-E is an infinite ideas machine.

Right now — even with the current betas — it takes about 5 minutes to generate 100 new ideas from a text prompt.

That’s faster than most creatives — and I say this as someone who has been in or led hundreds of brainstorming meetings. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one person create 100 ideas in 5 minutes, except maybe Abraham, and even he can’t do it 24/7.

With this tool, the average creative can generate more ideas in 5 minutes than even the most exceptional creatives. And they can keep doing it, generating 1,200 new ideas hour after hour. At some point even geniuses would run out of stamina.

AI is going to win here.

And in a year or two from now, it’ll be 100 ideas in 30 seconds.

This isn’t limited to just art. Anything can now be redesigned by uploading a photo and typing some words. It could be your living room. A new garden. A theme park. A pocket watch. Ideas on how to finish the top half of your painting. New car designs. A music album cover.

This will revolutionize human creativity.

All someone needs is a phone and imagination and they can create anything in seconds.

Steve Jobs once described a computer as a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.

AI image generation is a bicycle for human creativity.

Not using it will be like not using Photoshop. I mean, everyone could just do things with MS Paint… and that might be fun for niche art, but no one uses it for day to day graphic design.

This tech will be built into all the creative tools we use.

It’s already starting. I saw in Photoshop they have a waiting list for something called “Latent Visions” with the description “generate abstract artistic concepts based on text strings.” Since this is Adobe, I’m guessing this is years behind the current tech.

My point is that it will be built into Photoshop, TikTok, your phone… everything.

The change is coming.

New Frontiers

I love new frontiers. My businesses have always depended on them.

I never want to be the guy who can’t figure out the latest gadgets.

So here I am, late at night, obsessed with figuring out how in the world to make a mural with DALL-E.

Why a mural? Because one image is pretty basic and anyone can do it. But stitching a bunch of cool images that match together… it’s more of a challenge, and feels more inventive to me.

It’s frustrating, though. I haven’t used Photoshop in at least a decade. But back when I did, I used it every day, designing websites and posters for a graphic design agency I ran for many years.

I first tried to hack it using free online photo editors like Photopea but eventually I caved after losing two hours worth of work. Installing Photoshop locked up my computer, which felt like I was transported back in time.

Once I got it open, it felt so clunky. I forgot what tools do what. I clicked on random things and started screaming. I mean, googling.

Then it started coming back, hotkey by hotkey. Ah, that’s right, holding spacebar down lets me move around. Pressing v lets me select layers. Okay, I got this. It’s basically the same as ten years ago.

At first I was manually editing my creations, using the lasso tool to move things around, and then I realized I had it all backwards. I was editing. The AI can edit. This is not a useful thing for a human to do any longer. I am stuck in the past, and that’s what needs to change.

My first image creation:

Someone asked about good prompts to use, so I made a TikTok about prompt design too.

Now I’m working on a mural of a city, which I’m about 400 image generations deep on. I’m quite happy with how it’s coming together and excited to share it soon.

I’m also cooking up an idea that will combine these images with a guess-to-win game in Discord. Reply if you want an invite :)

I feel some excitement rising within me and I haven’t felt this in quite a while.

Maybe this will stick.

// Josh

(This was originally posted to my newsletter subscribers. If you want to read it earlier, subscribe over there!)

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I have two modes, maybe three.

Machine. This is when I’m obsessed with something. It’s always something new — new project, new relationship. My entire life bends around this thing. I am excited, energized, manic.

Human. When I’m getting in touch with myself again. I’m thoughtful. Reading new books. Focused on the long-term. Investing in relationships not obsessively but steadily. Taking in new inputs. I am calm, satisfied, renewed.

The Suck. When I’m in-between these. Burned out. Nothing feels good. I am lost, frustrated, depressed.

If I had to estimate, over the course of my life I probably fall into:

30% machine
20% human
50% suck

This year I’ve been stuck in The Suck.

I’ve always ping-ponged from Suck to Machine to Suck to Human to Suck. I even read a book about how this is surprisingly normal for entrepreneurs (The Hypomanic Edge).

I should know to expect this by now.

The Suck always comes.

Is The Suck cycle longer this year? I’m not sure, but in this moment, it feels like it. And it’s not just me; others around me are questioning their careers or taking a break from it. They’re experiencing The Suck, too.

It’s not actually bad — it’s a feeling, not fact.

I slip into Human, especially when I’m surrounded by nature.

I’ve experienced Machine this year in slivers, mostly during the NFT boom earlier this year (like when I learned graphQL on a night binge and built an API to feed it into Google Sheets). Or when I got these marbles to do magic. But this is faint, and only a whimper of what I’m capable of.

When am I most happy?

In full machine mode, or full human mode.

Excited or calm.

Manic or satiated.

The in-between suuuuuuuccckkks.

The Suck has gotten better as I age — I’ve become more unattached to outcomes and more self-compassionate (less mean post-its on my bathroom mirror about myself). Adventures can pull me out for a time… but at my core I want big progress, lasting impact, and see “Numbers Go Up.”

But what’s required to feel happy with success gets harder and harder.

It’s a high I keep chasing over and over but never quite catch.

I achieve bigger things, yet the next hit doesn’t feel as good as the last.

Perhaps it’s impossible. Like a dollar bill taped up behind the restaurant register… the owner is so proud of that. If they open a second or third restaurant, what are the chances they’ll feel as good?

Zero.

Nothing feels as good as that first dollar.

Brainjolt, a company I started a decade ago, will hit $50m in revenue this year; topping that with something else is challenging. And even if/when I do that, how long will I be satisfied? A few hours until I crave a new, even more impossible goal?

And so I try different directions. Maybe it’s a puzzle company. Maybe it’s an investment fund. Maybe it’s this newsletter.

But do I actually want to live a completely balanced life?

No.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through therapy and executive coaching it’s this: I sign up for this rollercoaster every day, and even on the days I complain about it, it’s a lot more fun than not riding a rollercoaster at all.

I grew up in Florida and as a kid my mom would take me to Busch Gardens. My favorite ride was The Montu — an upside down rollercoaster where your legs dangle. It was a rush.

On rare days there would be no line, and when the ride was over, my head buzzing, I’d run through the exit and through the gift shop and run back to the entrance and huff and puff through all the little mazes that are usually full of people but were empty and I’d jump right back on the rollercoaster.

Ends up, I’m still doing that today.

// Josh

Weekly Wanderings

🤯 The Perils of Audience Capture. This was, by far, the best article I read this week. It still floats around my head days after… the story of Nikocado Avocado haunts me. Gurwinder is a fantastic writer (and I’m unsurprised to see a pic of Neil Postman on his substack homepage). A highlight:

“When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they’d receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.”

🎵 Business economics in a nursery rhyme. “She sells seashells by the seashore, but the value of these shells will fall due to the laws of supply and demand…” This song by Ren is surprisingly catchy and, at least for the first few bars, pretty solid advice. brb gonna sell water to a fish, sell the time to a clock.

📧 Donald Knuth doesn’t check email and only checks his snail mail every 6 months. I do find some kind of delicious irony that his first point is “let’s drop the hypen” in “email” but then uses 3 dashes to denote an emdash (which is often referred to with a dash or space, but I have simplified, in honor of Dr Knuth). Choice quotes:

“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.” … “My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode — — like, one day every six months.” … “I DO NOT ANSWER UNSOLICITED EMAILS, nor do I respond to emails that were sent to my colleagues with a bothersome request for them to communicate with me.” … “In return, I promise not to send unwelcome email requests to you.”

📺 Mother (2009) is a 2009 South Korean thriller film directed by Bong Joon-ho that I watched this week. I’ve been on a South Korean movie and book kick lately (I’m reading Pachinko while watching Joon-ho movies). It’s nice how reading/watching similar things around a theme weaves together. This is a story about a mother who will do anything to prove her son innocent… it’s quite gripping.

🇨🇳 Xi Jinping’s bookshelf. Some scour the President of China’s bookshelf from video addresses to see what books he keeps handy. I was surprised to see how many heavy AI texts were included… though perhaps I shouldn’t be, considering how essential AI is to enforcing compliance at scale. “He is reading texts on understanding AI, AR, algorithms, and machine learning, including The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos and Augmented by Brett King.”

Laughing at the past

I took this screenshot in 2016. I no longer eat Honey Bunches of Oats (I used to eat a bowl of it almost every day for lunch — it was terribly convenient at the office)… so I’ve improved my diet. But Siri, even 7 years later, still makes mistakes like this. I guess it’s nice to have a friend that is consistent. Future Siri, please forgive me for all the mean things I said when you were not yet conscious.

PS: I’ve been checking Japan travel advisories every week, because I’m hoping to go back this year. This graph of Japan tourist arrivals is devastating: (via Lyn Alden)

PPS:

PPPS:

Donald Knuth has a page on his website dedicated to people who might be expecting a check from him. He also has a page dedicated to the pipe organ in his home, random photos of diamond signs, and known errors in his books. Someday I hope to be as cool as him.

PPPPS: Why would Knuth have a list of people he might owe checks to? Because he used to pay “a finder’s fee of $2.56 for any typographical errors or mistakes discovered in his books, because ‘256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar.’” At one point they were “among computerdom’s most prized trophies.” There is an entire wikipedia page dedicated to Knuth reward checks.

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I went to a book fair to make a friend.

In hindsight, this is the absolute worst place in the world to try and meet people. It’s a bunch of introverts looking at books. Or when not looking at a book, gazing at their shoes or their phones.

It’s one of my goals this year to make a new friend or two. Someone to grab a beer with and have an interesting conversation. Play some tennis. Get matching ouroboros tattoos in Bali. Whatever it is that adult friends do.

So I’m pushing myself to do something each week to get out there, rub shoulders, catch covid, run back home and watch a movie with my cat.

That’s how I found myself on Saturday morning, looking through LA events, landing on a book fair in the arts district of downtown Los Angeles.

I like books. I’ll go.

But first, an awkward confession.

Before I left I watched a couple YouTube videos.

On how to make friends as an adult.

That seems so ridiculous — like, I’m 40 and watching videos on how to make friends??

But it’s seriously so hard!

I’ve never been good at making friends.

I was an only child.

I was beat up in the locker room.

In high school my friends group decided one day to just kick me out.

They announced this by throwing my backpack onto the roof.

It got easier in my 20’s, but then as an entrepreneur it got harder, and lonelier.

This is how I ended up at a book fair, with a goal of making a friend, in an almost impossible situation.

I walked through the book fair, talking to the various publishers, watching the interestingly dressed people.

“Oh, my husband,” a woman says as I walk past, “he is SUCH an autodidact.”

Too high IQ projection, I think. Pass.

A crowd gathers around a 12 year old boy, and he’s telling some story, and the women are all smiling and sort of cooing around him.

“He’s so smart,” one says to the mother, “he’ll do well at Fancy Name Private School, I’m sure I can help him get in.”

Too parent-y, I think.

A man dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit. Fun. I get closer and overhear him: “I know I’m just a middle-aged white guy, but if they’re not interested, then they can just get the fuck out of here!”

Whoa, too aggressive, I think.

I end up sitting at a table, holding a parasol (because they have them?), eating a taco.

A woman writing in a notebook in front of me, writing so very small, even smaller than me, and she smiles and I smile back — but it was the comfortable silence of two people comfortable being alone.

An elderly woman sits next to me. She tells me “she pretends to be a writer.” I say that’s what all writers say. She’s writing a children’s book. I encourage her to talk to the publishers there, give some tips on finding an affordable illustrator, and wish her well as she needs to head back soon to Union Station to take the train back home.

AND THEN I FOUND MY FRIEND!!!!

They opened up to me like a book.

I knew they were the one.

…because it was a book.

And I like books.

It was not all that interesting from the cover, but as I paged through it, I was compelled to buy it and start reading it right then.

It treats graphic design as a liberal art, and goes in-depth on the history from a very practical perspective. And it even dives into watch design and computer interface design! This is my kind of book.

My introvert battery now being depleted, I left. I walked out of the building, berating myself. You idiot, you dolt, you shit-for-brains, you didn’t achieve your singular goal. You have zero new potential friends. All you have is another book, and you have enough books. Failure, failure, failure!

But you took a step, another voice says, you talked to some people, you walked around, you sort-of-kind-of mingled. And you found a cool new book. Be proud of yourself, be gentle on yourself, and do a little better next time.

A 42-hour… lecture?

As I drove home, listening to Pachinko, my mind kept wandering to one of the first things referenced in the book, a 42 hour lecture by on everything Buckminster Fuller learned in his life.

Whaaaaaaaaat.

I found the lectures online and started listening to it on my evening walk.

Bucky mentions his father would take business trips to South America and India.

Each trip would be take 2 to 3 months.

A single trip back then, I thought, is longer than all my international trips combined.

When I was in Spain for two weeks last year it felt like forever. I was getting homesick.

Two weeks!

I was inspired to make a TikTok about this crazy long lecture, and I was blown away by the interest. Lots of comments asked me to share my learnings about it.

I’m considering going through the whole thing as an intellectual exercise, but I haven’t yet committed to it. We’ll see.

Weekly wanderings

• 🫖 Turn Studio makes incredible pottery that animates as you rotate it. I’ve never seen anything like this, it’s mesmerizing.
• 🪞 People Selling Mirrors: my new favorite twitter account. When selling a mirror, people are faced with a terrible challenge… how to take a picture without being in it.
• 🧩 Jigzilla: the automatic puzzle solving machine, or “I made a robot to have fun for me (part 1)” ****I love so much about this video. It’s really a phenomenal way of showing how to build something from scratch — both the fun and the knock-your-head-against-the-wall. But Shane succeeds at building a machine that puts together jigsaw puzzles! Also, I learned about telecentric lenses. Maybe next time he can try a Blue Kazoo puzzle!
• 💪 Healthspan. This is a new word for me, and I learned it from Dr. Matt Kaeberlein on Tim Ferris’s podcast. Basically just because your lifespan goes up doesn’t mean it’s a great time to be alive. Increasing healthspan might be more important than increasing lifespan. This year I’ve been working out almost every day towards this goal.
• 🥔 Take better pictures of potatoes. This is a great primer on taking better pictures of an object with an iPhone. At this point taking good pics is all about simple techniques that anyone can learn — we all have the technology in our pockets to take incredible pictures.

// Josh

PS:

PPS:

PPPS:

PPPPS:

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I love hacks.
Shortcuts.
Things that save time, especially when they’re clever.

A mistake… or an opportunity?

So maybe it’s not surprising I did a full dead complete utter stop when I saw this postcard from 1915:

G. L. Hanger, you clever bastard.

I love a good copy/hack, so I immediately wanted to create an NFT collection that is just a black square with various captions like “Hand over lens.” “A view of the eclipse.” “View of a hole.” “Black beetle.” “4am”

But I didn’t. I just nodded my head in appreciation.

This is, by far, the easiest way to create a postcard. A black rectangle with some text over it. Even better, it’s funny — and with laughter, a postcard sale.

I wish I knew more about Mr. Hanger, but I can find nothing on him.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that survives him on the internet is this postcard, shown only in one article.

That article is from the Public Domain Review, a not-for-profit online journal with “a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful” who “hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age.”

That’s where I stumbled on Precedents of the Unprecedented: Black Squares Before Malevich.

A clever square

Here’s the “The Black Square” by Kazimir Malevich — which a “plurality of art historians, curators, and critics refer to as one of the seminal works of modern art, and of abstract art in the Western painterly tradition generally.”

The crackles came with age. You can see in an older photo from a gallery the way it looked originally:

It started as a stage curtain in 1913 in the futurist opera Victory over the Sun (“The audience reacted negatively and even violently to the performance, as have some subsequent critics and historians”).

Years ago I hated modern art like this. “I don’t get it,” I would say. “It just seems like a bad joke at the expense of people who like the art.”

But now I love it.

Especially when it’s a bad joke.

A black square is so simple, so audacious. No really, it was so audacious he was jailed and threatened for it:

The government of Joseph Stalin turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of “bourgeois” art, that could not express social realities. As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting similar art.

In autumn 1930, he was arrested and interrogated by the KGB in Leningrad, accused of Polish espionage, and threatened with execution.

The black square became a kind of a logo for Malevich: “The Black Square became Malevich’s motif, even his logo or trademark. In his later work, when he made a return to figurative paintings (often of peasants and workers), he signed many of them with a little black square.”

I also learned he paints like Abraham, who taught me to just layer on colors (or really, anything) until you get something you like (which for me, is never).

A little bonus to this technique: it exposed frauds and fakes, as paintings that didn’t use that technique were discarded as fraudulent.

What’s that in the background?

In the black and white studio photo I noticed something that caught my eye. It wasn’t quite as simple as the rest… it had a kind of kinetic motion, and reminded me of… well, I’ll show you what it reminded me of in a minute.

Zoom in a bit to see it:

Now, if you already know Russian art then you know what this is, because part of this series is the most expensive selling Russian art ever. But I didn’t know that, because I honestly know nothing about Russian art, and I’m just following my curiosity.

Which led me to Suprematist Composition (blue rectangle over the red beam):

Yum.

This painting sold for $85 million in 2018, the highest price paid for a work in the history of Russian art.

But it reminded me of…

Fidenza.

I love Fidenza. It’s a fine art NFT series based on an algorithm by Tyler Hobbes. It’s beautiful and flexible and kinetic and crazy expensive. I don’t own any, but it’s one of my life goals. 999 were created. Here are some examples showing how different they can be, yet clearly part of the same series:

Fidenza #313 (first one, top left) is one of the most expensive NFTs ever sold, $3.5m (1000 eth).

Memory is always different from reality. I’m gonna look again, are they as similar as I thought?

Yeah, they’re similar. There’s something about the movement — perhaps some kind of orbit — that reminds me of each other. The shapes. The angles. Even the colors are similar!

Okay, the similarities should probably have probably been the other way around (I should have thought of Malevich when seeing Fidenza!), and I blame the art school that I never went to. (Because even if I had went I wouldn’t have been paying attention.)

I need to see more Fidenza, and I found a site called Archipelago that made it easy to browse and I saw #479… man, I could stare at this for a long time. It’s like the thumbprint of the ocean.

Friggin beautiful.

I posted the comparison on twitter, because I’m trying to push myself to publish more:

And what do you know, Tyler Hobbs (who created Fidenza) liked it!

Which totally made my day.
You too, Emily.
But also Tyler.
What a world.

PS: This video on Tyler Hobbs deserves more than its 2,000 views. It’s gorgeous, for one, but also surprising — I didn’t expect to see Hobbs on a skateboard or riffing on the drums (that intro riff is fire). Now I want a black and white square shirt.

PPS: The arpeggio in the middle of the video… hit me and I used shazam (which I had almost forgotten about it and never used on a youtube until now) and violà: “Fearful Continuity” by Josh McCausland.

PPPS: From Tate Museum: Five ways to look at Malevich’s Black Square. This led me to a picture where Tate has partially reconstructed the old studio room. Next time I go to Tate it will be a different experience now that I know this!

PPPPS: Oh, Malevich also did the costume design for Victory in the Sun (”radical, anti-realist designs that combined volumetrically-shaped body coverings and shocking color schemes”). I really need to level up my style.

Winning Fights Will Ruin the Relationship

From Nedra Glover Tawwab:

A little secret from a therapist: In romantic relationships winning fights will ruin the relationship. Disagreements are about learning, listening, and understanding the needs and perspectives of your partner. Healthy fights end with a resolution, not with the feeling of victory. If you are arguing to be right, you’re doing it wrong.

OB-4: The Magic Radio

The OB-4 boombox by the incredible teenage engineering is a marvel. It’s so fun — a minimalist design reminiscent of Dieter Rams, but far more playful.

OB–4 continuously memorizes everything you listen to on an endless looping tape. rewind, time-bend and loop at the flick of your fingertips. on purpose or by accident.

If you change the volume from your phone, the knob turns! It plays the radio with one button. It’s samples the radio into an ambient music mode. Mantras built in. Metronome. It’s quite impressive, and kinda silly, and while I’m certainly not gonna pay $650 for it, I did enjoy this 3 minute review by Derrick Gee on TikTok.

Worthless short-term band-aids

I’ve been working on a bad habit of mine: choosing the easy, short-term fix vs the hard, long-term one. The short-term fixes are so tempting… they’re quick, painless, and “resolve” things with minimal conflict. I choose it automatically. But before long, a similar problem just comes back again to haunt me.

Instead, I’ve been trying to purposefully chose the harder path — a path that involves more suffering up front for me, but fixes it for good.

Some questions I’ve been asking myself to uncover the long-term path:

“What uncomfortable thing can I do now to make things better for my future self?”
“Fast forward three years… why did this fail?”
“What would I do if it were easy?”

A glimpse: NYC

Emily and I arrived in NYC late… the only thing open and walkable was a $0.99 pizza spot. An unusually inclusive environment — transient people standing at the counter eating, goth kids laughing pouring parmesan, a couple making out in the brightly-lit corner, Emily with a big grin asking if it was okay to take a picture.

We grabbed a couple slices, walked outside, sat on the stoop. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Emily said, “we’re eating a slice of real New York pizza on a real New York stoop!”

She snapped a picture of me. We took our customary eye-rolling selfie. A man picked through the garbage next to the curb, finding crusts and bringing them back to his stoop. A limo parked out front, the door opened and someone ran into the pizza shop.

“Do you want to blot your pizza with napkins?” Em asked, “it looks greasy.”

And that’s what I did while we sat and watched the cars pass, the delivery drivers stop to chat, the rats racing from shadow to shadow.

Until next time,

// Josh

(This was originally posted to my newsletter subscribers. If you’re not subscribed, you can subscribe here!)

(\__/)
(>’.’<)
(“)_(“)

I am the only thing I have to offer

I wrote this in my journal this morning, sitting on my hammock, chewing my pen.

You know, the days when you click on something and end up in weird places in cool corners of the internet until you basically forget to breathe and as you come up gasping for air you feel tingles of what a wonderful and wild world we have and there’s so much that you’ll never know but at least today you know a couple more things than yesterday.

Days like these give me energy. They introduce me to new things. They… make me feel shiny.

So I thought, maybe I should create a newsletter and name it RabbitHoles.

This first one starts with…

Deleting TikTok

I’ve been deleting TikTok off my phone recently. But it keeps… coming back.

And by that I mean, I keep installing it again.

This time it was so that I could look at the comments for a recipe I had saved. TikTok won’t let me view the comments on the phone without installing the app. So, you know, I had to.

(I’ve since noticed I can see comments on desktop, but I probably won’t let this stop me from re-installing the app in the future.)

Charlie Kaufman: painfully vulnerable, but inspiring

After I viewed the recipe a video came up by Derrick Gee.

Derrick has this professorial voice and calm demeanor that caught my attention.

He says:

If you are an aspiring director, writer, photographer, musician, creative of any kind who makes something, I really want you to watch this next video. It’s a lecture by Charlie Kaufman, who’s an Oscar winning screenwriter who wrote Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It is painfully vulnerable, painfully honest, but really inspiring. I come back to this clip once every six months. It’s like food for the soul.

I had only re-installed TikTok for the recipe, but… Derrick is personally requesting me to watch this video.

Okay, maybe not personally, but he’s looking at me and talking in my direction so I’ll keep watching.

Say who you are really

Here’s a transcript of what Charlie Kaufman said at a lecture to BAFTA in 2011 that Derrick highlights:

say who you are really
say it in your life and in your work
tell someone out there who is lost
someone not yet born
someone who won’t be born for five hundred years
your writing will be a record of your time
it can’t help but be but more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are
you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world
because that person will recognize him or herself in you
and that will give them hope
and it’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it it’s profound
importance in my life give that to the world rather than selling something to the world
don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work
and that in the end selling is what everyone must do
try not to

this is from EE Cummings:
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting

the world needs you
it doesn’t need you at a party
having read a book about how to appear smart at parties
these books exist and they’re tempting
but resist falling into that trap
the world needs you at the party
starting real conversations
saying ”I don’t know”
being kind

Kaufman reads most of these words, hardly looking up.

People make such a big deal out of needing to publicly speak without reading notes, but I wonder if it really matters at all.

It didn’t here, anyway.

Maybe you’re not interesting

He continues:

it’s essential, it’s not easy, because there’s a lot in the way
in many cases a major obstacle is
your deeply seated belief that you are not interesting
and since convincing yourself that you are interesting is probably not going to happen
take it off the table
agree
perhaps I’m not interesting
but I am the only thing I have to offer
and I want to offer something
and by offering myself in a true way I am doing a great service to the world

I took a moment to let that sink in.

I read it again and chewed on it.

I listened to this yesterday — reading it again today feels even more profound.

Like many others, I have a belief that I am, in fact, extremely and embarrassingly uninteresting.

There are others much smarter.

Others more witty.

Others more entertaining.

Others more successful.

Why even bother?

And the answer is…

because I am the only thing I have to offer.

tiny paths

Stephen Fry quotes Oscar Wilde

Wilde said if you want to be a grocer or
a general or a politician or a judge
you will invariably become it
that is your punishment

if you never know what you want to be
if you live what some might
call the dynamic life
but I will call the artistic life
if each day you are unsure of who you are
and what you know
you will never become anything
and that is your reward

Sometimes I get frustrated that I’m 40 and still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. What do I want to be doing 10 years from now? No idea. But on a good day, that’s the magic. Maybe I’ll be running an investment company or maybe traveling Asia or maybe directing a movie. I choose the dynamic life.

A clever dark pattern by Uber Eats:

By telling users they’ll provide the store with their name and photo, many will pass on leaving a bad review but will be happy to still leave a good review. This is one of the reasons why Uber Eats ratings are so inflated and unhelpful.

“I sucked as an executive.”

Abraham Piper, who has been my business partner for a decade (and still going strong) posted a TikTok about why he was a terrible an executive (his words, not mine).

A while back he stepped out of his executive position at Brainjolt to start painting. It was the right decision, but it was hard for both of us in different ways. I still admire how he followed his heart, and it inspired me to later hand off many of my own responsibilities (eventually culminating in hiring a CEO to replace me, to everyone’s relief). While we’re still involved as co-founders and board members, we’ve since started Blue Kazoo, a puzzle company!

A glimpse of my life:

Hobbes, my 16 year old snaggletooth, sleeps in my sweatpants as he holds my arm. I almost lost this guy not too long ago and feel thankful for every little hug he gives.

Thanks for reading,

// Josh

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Sometimes I remind myself that the only way out is thru.

Starting over sounds easier. More fun. It’s the same. You’ll encounter this again. Figure it out.

Others have been through worse. Get up, dust off, try again.

There’s a hack to make it shorter, easier, more fun. Find it.

Remember: the journey is a choice. How to handle it is definitely a choice.

It’s harder alone. Bring companions.

Choose them wisely. You intertwine. You become each other.

You won’t remember the end of the journey — just the journey.

Are you learning something from this?

Most don’t.

Sometimes the hack is to quit. Is this really worth your time?

Sometimes the hack is to get others to quit.

Distractions are the enemy. Focus. Head towards your goal. Even inches add up over time.

No, not so focused that you rob your joy. Follow your curiosity. Enjoy the rabbit trails.

Don’t walk off any cliffs. That’s stupid.

Be prepared if you do.

Complaining makes it worse. For others. For you.

Seriously, everyone hates complainers.

“You can’t do it, it can’t be done, it’s a waste of time,” others say reasonably. It’s true if you listen.

It will be a long slog. Rest when you need to.

Bring along the ones you love.

There will be dark nights. Also glorious mornings.

Cut out the energy suckers, the whiners, the doubters, the unlucky, the ones you know don’t belong, the ones who hate change and never will.

You’re bored? That’s on you. Change.

The only way out is thru.

Start.

“If you won a small lottery and $100k was in your account tomorrow, what would you do with the money?”

I like asking Tiffany questions like this, and as I ask her this one, she puts her book down and considers it.

“Hmm,” she says, “A hundred isn’t that much really. I like my Prius. I’m happy with where I live and anyway it’s not enough to buy a house in LA. So I guess I’d invest it. I don’t think I’d do anything different than I am now. What about you?”

“Same,” I say. “I’d invest some and set the rest aside as cash. Maybe I’d buy my dad a truck. But I don’t need anything more than I have, and I don’t really want more.”

Later, at dinner with friends, I ask the same question. Everyone says they’d invest the money, with the exception of one who might splurge on microblading their eyebrows that they keep seeing in Instagram ads.

I realize the answer of “I’d invest it” comes from remarkable privilege and a certain amount of selfishness. Others would give very different answers. They would fund their grandfather’s glaucoma surgery. Send money back home so their parents can stay in their apartment. Finally get health insurance. Or maybe they’d donate it all anonymously.

My parents’ answer to this question at my age would have been very different than mine. They had a mortgage, a kid to feed, private school to pay for, old cars to fix, land to maintain, and credit cards to pay off. I have none of these expenses, because I rent a small guest house, have no kids, have a reliable car and have been debt-free since I was like 24. My monthly expenses are roughly the same as my parents, yet as an urban millenial I have significantly more free time, less stuff, and less stress.

A recent survey found that millenials don’t buy backyards for kids — they buy them for their dogs. They value three things when buying their first house:

1. More space
2. Building equity
3. Getting a yard for puppers

Think about how different this answer is from our parents generation. Would they have ever, even for a second, thought about getting a house with a backyard for their dog? No way. They wanted a house because it was part of the American dream. To give a better life to their kids. To partake in the married life they saw on television. To have an investment they could live in for the rest of their lives.

Millenials are lifestyle designers. Many of us waited on having kids and focused instead on building our careers and saving money. When we do spend money, we tend to spend it on experiences, not stuff. Our photo albums and social media are full of these experiences, along with our pets and random memes. We have less possessions, less responsibilities, more freedom, more free time, and even more savings. We talk about “adulting” and wonder if we’re doing it yet. Heck, we hardly even go into brick and mortar stores, unless we’re sitting down to eat, which we do all. the. time. When we want an actual product, we don’t go shopping — we grab our phone and add it to our Amazon cart.

Our lives, by comparison, are full of ease. But is it less full, less rich? I really don’t know. I don’t have the stress and pressure my parents had, but I’m also missing the satisfaction of hard physical work, multi-generational family life, and raising kids in a tiny town.

I’ll take what I have, though. Which on this Sunday means shutting the computer, joining Tiffany on the porch to read until we decide to break for lunch — brie and crackers from Trader Joe’s — and play a new board game that came yesterday… in, of course, a brown Amazon package left by the front door.

“When you are operating out of courage you are saying that no matter how you feel about yourself or your opportunities or the outcome, you are going to take a risk and take a step towards what you want. You are not waiting for the confidence to mysteriously arrive.” — Debbie Millman

People talk a lot about confidence. Hold yourself high. Pose powerfully. Look at your power board. Believe in yourself. You can do anything. You’ve got this.

But sometimes it’s just not there. You are a confident-free zone. You know that, deep down, you don’t actually know what you’re doing. You’re just throwing things against a wall, hoping something sticks. You’re hanging on to today by a thread. You don’t feel like giving that speech. Leading that meeting. Teaching the class. Doing the deal. Making the call. Having that conversation. Doing what you know you should do.

When confidence wanes, turn to courage.

Courage is doing it even though you know you’ll fail.

Courage is doing it after you’ve failed.

And then doing it again.

And again.

Courage is speaking up even if you’re the only voice.

Courage is saying no and facing the consequences.

Courage is saying yes and facing the consequences.

Courage is doing it differently than everyone else.

Courage is looking stupid.

Courage is being laughed at.

Courage is doing it again after looking stupid and being laughed at.

Courage is admitting your fear, your ignorance, your weakness.

Courage creates more courage.

Courage creates success.

And success creates confidence.

When confidence wanes, turn to courage was originally published in Between Letters on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.