From the moment I hopped off the ferry that took me to Estonia, I had the feeling I would love it there.
I was right.
Tallinn is a quiet city, especially at the point when I visited in mid-March. But it hosts so many cozy spaces, so many comfort foods, and so many well-functioning systems that make it an easy place to live.
Explore with me in my latest video.
Took Kai to the mall right by the border to visit the trending ramen bar. Kind of a quick way to build a business by providing packaged ramen and hot water for people to make it themselves, but still a lot of fun! Generous kimchi and seaweed salad sides.
Had a team retreat last week, first time meeting half of my newer teammates in person.
I spent a few years as a one-person department. At the time it was out of necessity, but I am so glad those days are behind me.
Teams are where it’s at!
Glad baseball season’s almost here but I admit I’ll probably miss the Bryce Harper food influencer content when it slows down.
Improv doubleheader tomorrow night.Catch me in the 7pm block with Pacific Quiche.Eat, watch more shows, etc.Then come back for the 10pm block for my freestyle rap show with Optimus Rhyme.
The irony of perhaps taking a day off work to mull over the Severance finale.
Okay, some reactions. Spoilers ahead so avert your gaze and hasten your thumbs if you wish to avoid.
🛑
I personally loved the finale. Mixed feelings about its actual events, but every change in beat to that episode had me leaning further in. And you know it’s wild when the existence of every character is pretty much in jeopardy but you’re most invested in whether or not a goat survives.
This finale had a really good blend of answering questions and raising new ones. The numbers are your wife! One of the things it confirmed are that Kier’s motivation is to create a world without pain, and that perfectly crosses with Mark’s decision to sever his way past the grief process.
I think the best hero-villain dynamics are when they’re two characters who are forced to make the same decision but take different routes. And you could extend that to innie Mark refusing to let go, in contrast to outie Mark severing as a way to force letting go.
In theory they could park it right here and call that the series finale. Some plot lines felt very resolved. Like Dylan’s or Cobel’s. And a lot of the ambiguity at the end felt deliberate, like The Graduate. But there’s still plenty to explore with the Eagans and Gemma, and I think a true series finale wouldn’t be right without John Turturo and Christopher Walken.
This is one of the more interesting fictional worlds to hang out in from recent years, so I wouldn’t mind another round.
Also, how is Mr. Milchick’s forced smile the perfect image of corporate America?
A good move: Booking Kai a slime session in Glendale
Went places this weekend. MarioLand was well done. Whole park was an interactive story game. Lots of AR/motion oriented games and fun translations of MarioKart & Mario Party type experiences. I appreciate Toad’s culinary turn.
Respect to whoever designed the Gallagher Square Playground.
This year, January 20 was a rather dramatic and infamous day. And here’s how I spent it:
Getting a haircut, spending the day with my five year old, eating at a retro diner, exploring a mom and pop vintage toy store, and playing arcade games.
Resistance takes many forms, but I think the most important thing to do during inhumane times are to connect with the most human things we do. Things like making art, parenting, making each other laugh, and humoring curiosity.
Viktor Franklin notes that meaning can be found in any circumstance and our ability to chose how we respond defines us. A lot of things have felt heavy lately, and while hardship is inevitable, the most essential freedom is one’s freedom to choose their attitude.
Notes from Arizona:
Arizona is a sneaky player in the fast food scene. The Greater Phoenix area has cut a deal with just about every chain we used to think of as regional. Who else has can get a Whataburger, In N Out, Culver’s, and Dutch Bros in one intersection?
I really wish I could enjoy the SuperBeaker IPA from West Brewing Co as much as I enjoy its can design.
The Vincent Wolfe Play Structure in Yuma is the perfect halfway-there playground break for kids doing the commute between San Diego and Phoenix… as long as it’s under 100° F.
Few things exemplify overpromise-and-underdeliver quite like naming the city Surprise, AZ, but apparently it was named after its founder saying “I’d be surprised if this place amounted to much”
“You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery. You can show beauty with it; you can do a lot of things. You can show—with a camera you can show things that you like about the universe, things you hate about the universe. It's capable of doing both.”
–Gordon Parks
This quote speaks to the heart of the work I do. Not every storyteller uses a camera as their main tool, but in whatever way we’re telling and sharing stories about the world we get to choose what to call attention to.
Try not to be one-note. Only showing the happy stuff risks being insensitive, and only showing the suffering risks being exploitative. Of furthering the idea that things must always be this way. Play against stereotypes. Depict movement and transformation.
If you’re not familiar, it’s a magazine-slash-media-platform completely dedicated to reviewing products. They’ll periodically focus on a certain category of products, say, home workout equipment, or trendy cooking tools. In general, though, they’ll review the performance of the product in order to tell you if it’s worth your money.
Overall, this is actually a very helpful thing to do. Getting products that function well and last long, even if they aren’t the flashiest, is simply good stewardship. Most people could probably benefit from thinking more critically before making purchases.
But I also have to admit, something about the magazine made me uneasy.
See, I’m used to magazine titles generally telling you who the magazine is for. Scientific American is for Americans who love science, or at least have a working relationship with it. Conde Naste’s Traveller is for, well, travelers. People Magazine… hey, I guess they played their hand to get the widest possible readership.
And generally, subscribing to something meant identifying with whatever that title was.
But, Consumer Reports? I wasn’t sure about that. I didn’t feel jazzed about seeing ‘consumer’ as a part of my core identity. In my eulogy, would I be fine having someone say Philippe was a traveler? Sure. Philippe was a person? I mean, that wouldn’t be terribly creative, but it’s at least accurate. Philippe was a consumer?
That would almost make me feel like I did something wrong.
Perhaps it isn’t this way for everybody, but for me, the word consumer doesn’t have the best connotation. It feels like someone who pisses off the Lorax. The Spirit of Consumption keeps ruining Christmas. And maybe it’s because I live in fire-prone California, that I hear the word consume as a threat.
I mean, a large part of it is excess. There’s probably a reason why the mental image I have for the phrase “consumer mentality” is of somebody sitting at the end of a sushi conveyor belt with their mouth open, just waiting to be fed with no effort.
But along with the gluttony comes a sense of entitlement. An expectation that things should be done satisfactory to their tastes.
I’ve worked in nonprofits adjacent to churches to have a sense for what this is like in a church setting. Picture your stereotypical megachurch. Flashy band. High production value. A sharp, charismatic pastor.
It’s become more about putting on a show than building a community. The word pastor is actually supposed to be more synonymous with shepherd than speaker. Leading from a stage is only a small part of a role meant to care for the soul.
But many churches have come to place such an emphasis on production value, many finding ways to justify that excessive focus. And so in instances where the production gets disrupted, many forget that it was never the point all along. And to be fair, when the production gets surpassed by another one in town, many of the audience members go elsewhere to get their fix, threatening the viability of the church long term.
We’d be mistaken if we thought this was just a church thing. It’s everywhere. Jobs. Relationships. Cities. We examine if these things are serving us and move on if they’re not.
There’s another way to do things. One that doesn’t just look for what you can get out of something, but what you can give to it. One that asks how your contributions can fit in.
Sure are.
So often when I see a good film or see a good performance, I get a sense of I-kinda-wish-I-made-that envy. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous the wish might be. I’ll be listening to Tyler the Creator like, ah, why didn’t I think of using that analogy to talk about coming to terms with getting older! I’ll temporarily forget that I have neither the musical skill nor reach that Tyler has. It’s much better for the world that the muses sent that bit of inspiration his way instead of mine.
But I’ll then wonder what I liked from his music that I can incorporate into my artwork. My writing. My performances. Vulnerability. Calling out a fear using sensory details. Got it.
My way to engage with things I like is through incorporation.
How can I pull apart some components and make it fit the bigger picture?
But not everybody is like that.
I think of how my kids’ naturally find their own way of playing with new toys. One is more precious about the packaging than the others. One tends to prefer order. The other inserts snippets of real life conversation into action figure roleplay all the time.
I think, similarly, we each have our own ways of engaging stuff.
Some people like to pull apart at different elements to figure out how it works.
Some people are curators, wanting to elevate the value of things through selectivity.
Some people are customizers, taking generic objects and making them personal.
Some people play hard, recognizing that things are ultimately temporary but that they can be enjoyed fully right now.
Ultimately no one way of doing things is the correct way, but knowing that we have so many different options makes consumerism look pretty boring as a default setting.
This was an idea I had circa 2011. At the time, Foursquare was pretty heavily used. So was Yelp. As a college student, I was pretty familiar with RateMyProfessor. What if somebody just consolidated all of these review places into one massive review system.
Looking back, it wasn’t a good idea.
The concept of reviews seems courteous enough. Leave my opinion to help other people make informed decisions in the future. The only thing is that this became kindling to what was already a rampant consumer culture. Consumer culture persistently but quietly asks what am I getting out of this? Review culture says the quiet part out loud.
It’s one thing when a mom and pop business takes a few losses when a negative review comes in after a bad day. It’s another when an artist starts to question their self worth when a vulnerable work gets panned. In the words of Ratatouille villain Anton Ego, “we risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.”
As this worsens you see people negatively score an upcoming movie because they changed the race or gender of fictional characters. The movie studios pull back on promoting the film or make creative changes, and now the consequences are more real.
In a Black Mirror episode, people are given 1-5 stars based on the interactions that other people have with them, and it doesn’t lead anywhere good.
If you ever stumble across a mean comment on a public social media account, 95% of the time, the comment comes from a private account. Someone not willing to eat what they dish out. Someone who probably sees the world as a more vicious place and acts accordingly.
Maybe that seems like a surprising conclusion to wind up in after I’ve just explored all the issues with a consumerist mindset. But hear me out.
I think to some extent, we actually are consumers. We must, at the very least, consume food, shelter, and all the other necessities to our survival. And in all likelihood, we go well beyond that because it enriches our lives.
I don’t think we’ll benefit from being in denial about this reality. By accepting that we are consumers, we’ll actually be able to make decisions about how we consume more carefully.
The problem was never in being consumers or even seeing ourselves as consumers, the problem is in letting that be the main way we see ourselves. Letting it be our main way of interacting with makers and materials.
Consumers are, ultimately, passive actors. Yes, their reviews may be harsh and scathing, but they’re often that way because that’s the only modicum of power they experience. If you’re a consumer, you’re at the mercy of the other people making stuff for you without the ability to engage your own creativity. Imagine a food critic who doesn’t know how to make a grilled cheese. Imagine a food critic who would starve if not for the cooking ability of others, even the 1-stars.
Consumerism will quickly make you lose sight of your own agency. You know, that thing you’re born with that makes an impact on the world. When you get caught up participating in a world where people are constantly judging and assigning value, it makes it all the more tempting to hide your magic.
Here’s my recommendation: let your consumerism be outpaced by your cultivatorism- a sweet little word I made up to describe approaching things with a desire to make them better. At times that may call for feedback. Like a garden, you’ll take what you need, but disrupt nothing more than is necessary.
One thing I try to do pretty intentionally with my art is making sure it’s not all ballers, historical figures, and household names, but that the world’s “ordinary people” are also celebrated with equal enthusiasm.
This was based on a friend’s visit to Oman. I love capturing those travel encounters where kindness just blitzes through any physical or cultural barrier.
The hardest thing to do is nothing.
It sounds unlikely at first, but if you’ve ever given yourself a real meditation challenge of trying to release each thought as it comes, you know what I’m talking about. Add the way my mind usually works, and yeah, doing nothing is a lot harder than doing too much.
For the past several months, I’ve tried to make -doing nothing- my quest. I had a fun and exciting year for most of 2024 but towards the end I was beyond ready for some rest. I found a nearly six month block with no trips or big ticket items and set a goal to keep it that way.
Almost immediately, everyone at home got sick, so the first couple months of the do nothing experiment weren’t exactly restful. But I wondered about the conspicuous timing right when I decided to make more space.
Eventually things got more restful. “Nothing” began to include more field trips with the kids, making kombucha, freestyle rap improv, date nights, and arcades. (My version of nothing may look really different from others’!)
It’s a chaotic time in the world, and deliberately doing nothing seems almost frivolous. But just like you gotta get a good water-type or two before taking on a Charizard, it’s important to meet the chaos with an opposite energy. Stillness. I think Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh said it better, but they didn’t have Pokémon analogies!
Anyways, with Spring emerging and having just returned from my first trip in a while (a small, sweet one), I suspect that this season is giving way to a new one. But it gave us a lot of good.
Acceptable use of AI in art
You know, my theory is that the weirder and more niche your hobby is, the more you’re probably enjoying it. Maybe that's why becoming a freestyle rapper at an indie improv theatre in my mid-30's is some of the most fun I've had in a long time.
The Arawak. The Akawaio. The Wai-Wai. A dozen other indigenous tribes. Britain. India. West Africa. The Caribbean. China. Brazil…
All these places have in some way have left a pretty strong impression on Guyana.
You don’t really find this unique blend anywhere else. The cultural formation of Guyana is fascinating.
“Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Peace dominates war; faith reconciles doubt. Mutual regard cancels enmity.”
Rev. James Lawson passed away last summer. John Lewis called him the “architect of the non-violence movement.” He was very much the strategist of Civil Rights.
He studied nonviolent resistance in India and Africa before returning to the U.S. to attend theological seminary.
In one of his last public statements, Lawson determined, “the U.S. must experience a series of nonviolent campaigns that will make what we did in the 20th century look tiny and small and calm in comparison… I can’t try to pretend what all those campaigns ought to be and can be, but … they must be deeply connected with … the deep strategies and philosophies and behaviors of nonviolence that came out of the ‘60s.”
Nairobi Street Kitchen is one of the coolest little hangouts in Nairobi. Great artsy space, food trucks with all kinds of options, a bar and artist shops.
It also helped me out on my quest to keep finding Filipino food in surprising places (Helsinki, Vienna, Alaska, etc). I got these adobo wings which will let me add Kenya to that list.
First ever match for San Diego FC results in their first ever win!
Despite my bitterness over the Loyal shutting down and my underwhelm at the team’s initial branding, I’m determined to take a liking to them.
I became a dad at 29. I knew things would change, but those changes wound up being far more dramatic than I imagined.
Four months later was when the world went into pandemic-induced lockdown, and two months after that was when I turned 30.
I don’t need to recount too much of the following year after that, as much of it was the same set of historical events you remember living through. I often felt thankful that, if I had to take a year-long hiatus from most of my life due to an outbreak, it overlapped with the year I’d spent wrapped up with the domestic duties of taking care of a newborn.
Then, two years later, as things started to slowly return to normal, we found out we were having twins. I’d have to wait even longer to return to normal.
Those kids are now five, three, and three. In many ways, I’ve been able to go back to things I enjoyed pre-parenthood. I can run regularly and stay physically active. I have a decent social life-especially by the standards of a 30-something dad. I also get to travel a fair amount, though it takes a lot of planning to minimize the impact of my absence, and I often spend a lot of extra energy and money just to make it home a little sooner.
At the same time, I realize I have a lot of trips I’d like to take that are on the “when-the-kids-are-older” list. There are several hobbies and projects on that list, too.
As your kids get older, you do regain the capacity to think beyond survival mode. To do things for fun. To have your own pursuits.
The thing is, it happens gradually.
Slowly.
Very slowly.
I’m not going to mention it by name so I don’t spoil anything, but it had a premise that flirted with sci-fi and religion. Every episode left you wondering where things were going. And refreshingly, this one actually delivered a pretty satisfying conclusion.
In the end, the characters we were rooting for ended up “resetting the clock.” They undid a lot of the bad that was done over several seasons, landing back at a point in time before the adventure, aged down a few years, healed and reunited.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to hit reset on some of the things going on in the world right about now?
Here’s the thing. Nostalgia is a helluva drug. I wouldn’t be the first to speculate that a lot of our current political angst comes from the population falling for the false allure of nostalgia. 29 cent burgers. A Simpsons-esque lifestyle from blue collar work. Bachelor degrees that can actually get jobs.
I don’t fall for that, though! I know better than to roll back civil rights progress just to get back to a romanticized version of the 1950s, right?
Well… I do have my own version of the nostalgia trap.
Compared to the online doom, the bully culture of politics, and the angry echo chambers of our modern era, it feels like I grew up in a totally different world. The 90s of my childhood and even my 2000s teen years were generally optimistic. Emerging technologies seemed promising. Politics was… functional. At the very least, it wasn’t a distraction from people pursuing their missions.
I often find myself tempted to think of those as the baseline, and that whenever we snap out of the current drama, we’ll get back to that vibe.
But that’s just as much of a snapshot in time as 1955. Or 1945. Or 2020. And like all those years, it’s over. There’s no obligation for the world to revert.
You probably already knew that, but bonus fact: when flamingo moms have children, they lose that pink hue. Those nutrients are dispersed among their kids.
But after a while, the pink comes back.
In so many ways, I feel like I’ve turned that corner. I’ve been able to be pretty active in the world of improv locally. I managed to train for and complete a marathon last year. We went to a concert last weekend. There was a four year window when the only live show I went to was Daniel Tiger live!
I can live it up, but this isn’t a return to myself at 29.
There are still things I have to say no to, or to wait on. My friend’s stories of playing in a rec softball league sound fun. Perhaps another time.
There are all these adventures, mountain expeditions, hiking trails that take at least a week that I have bookmarked. They’re saved for that mystical time of “when the kids are older.”
I’m realizing that, much like the societal norms of the 90s, my old life isn’t coming back. Even as the kids gain more independence, that comes along with baseball games and school plays for me to attend… maybe even coach. And even when they start driving or leave for school and I’m not logistically needed… that point is so far away, I’ll be a different person by then regardless.
On the other hand, all I need to do is compare our present reality with our demands and schedules two years ago to see that things have gotten way easier. We got some more breathing room and space to discover who we are now.
1) Things aren’t going to be like this forever
and
2) They’re not going to simply revert to how things were
This feels extremely similar to Octavia Butler’s underlying philosophy of change being the only concept, but in early 2025, she’s gotten enough things eerily correct, so why not?
Once again, the world will be morphing into something new. And every person, regardless of belief, creed, or political position needs to decide whether to be reactive or proactive.
The reactives are, more often than not, participating in the movement away from how things were. Whether it’s from their shocked expressions, doomerism, or default state of panic, they solidify the fact that the old way of doing things is over.
It’s human to react to being uprooted from a familiar spot. I don’t think you lose points, morally speaking, just from having reactions to things that are drastic. Just know that this is a terrible vantage point for decision making.
On the other hand, those who are proactive are the ones building the world that is to come. They know that with change comes opportunity, and they’re ready and waiting to not miss their chance. They’re out there building community, because like Grace Lee Boggs puts it, revolution doesn’t come via critical mass as much as it does via critical connections. They’re sharpening their skills. They’re undistracted.
Right now, in a moment where chaos seems to be the new order… where so many norms and institutions are no longer considered untouchable… I know there are few things I have the ability to safeguard. But those include things like optimism, imagination, and a persistent belief in people. And I think that’s enough of a toolkit to contribute towards building something new, as long as I’m not going at it alone.
I don’t think I have the freedom I might have at 49. In theory.
But right now I think I’m actually in the best of both possible worlds.
My kids are at a fun stage. They’re a pretty good combination of still-cute, lower-maintenance-than-before, and hilarious in their strides towards being independent. I always wanted a big family and the days I get to spend with them validate that it’s a good fit for me.
Of course, life is pretty complicated. There’s always a tension between doing the things that make me feel like myself, and the reality that part of being me means being a dad. There’s a very thin line in between, “hey, isn’t it great the kids are old enough where we can do this again,” and “I think we may have packed in a bit too much.”
Not only is the line thin, but it’s a moving line, oscillating with the seasons.
I am also very aware, maybe even too aware, of how quickly this season will go and how you never know when life might change drastically and suddenly. I do feel the need to live each year like my last, because in some ways it is. It’s the last year of my life having this exact composition of freedom and responsibility, of my kids at this stage, of it being colored in these shades. There’s no use in getting lost in nostalgia or daydreaming about the future.
I understand that living in an age of anger, anxiety, and chaos makes you want to hit fast-forward. Or rewind. Or to find some other means of escapism.
But I also think it’s necessary to stay grounded in the present. It’s the only way to plant seeds of the world to come.
It was less than a week before my marathon. Tuesday morning, with the race scheduled for Sunday, I got an email announcing it was postponed by two months. Another thing I kept tabs on were protests in Nairobi against a new finance bill.
The issues being protested were far more important, of course, but this was a really big blow to my training plan. The week before I ran 20 miles and was now tapering. I had felt some knee and muscle pain, and was carefully balancing staying in race shape with avoiding injury.
Now I had to do stretch that out over two months, a timeframe that included a work trip where I wouldn’t be able to run, and the hottest part of the year.
I considered trying again the following year. I thought about maybe using my Kenya reservations as a tourist and simply running a marathon elsewhere. I looked at Washington. South Dakota. But none of that was satisfying.
I decided that the biggest question was “what makes for the better story?”
I hadn’t been training for months to run the South Dakota marathon. Nairobi was the goal. And as obnoxious as it would be to yo-yo my training and risk injury, the better story clearly was to take the more difficult path.
In the end, I ran in Kenya. If you saw my video you know I did get injured AND I finished the race despite that. I am kind of stubborn about this whole better story philosophy, I guess.
Nature shows us.
Diversity is a strength.
Lacking diversity is a weakness.
And Guyana is a pretty gorgeous testament to diversity, in a number of ways.
The Big Finish…
I think I expected a wave of emotion at the finish line, but to be honest it most mostly a big sigh of ASANTE SANA, WE’RE DONE.
I’ve heard people say that the race itself isn’t the marathon, the training is. All the early starts to the day, running a half marathon before work, figuring out how to keep up with the training plan despite travel and injury, it was a lot!
For that reason, I’m glad I kinda went big for this race.
Like a lot of people, apparently, I’m hoping to untangle as much of my life from the world of social media as possible. The reasons aren’t going to be terribly unique or novel.
I read somewhere that the bulk of younger Instagram users would be willing to pay money if it would make the app vanish from existence. That response was even stronger towards TikTok.
Can you imagine hating, for example, a restaurant so much that you would pay for it to go away? It’s no longer enough to go elsewhere, it’s a matter of eliminating its impact on the world you live in.
It hasn’t always been this bad, though. I can’t deny a lot of the really good things that social media has opened up in my life. For the past two decades, I’ve dabbled in a lot of creative endeavors. And social media has been instrumental in how I’ve connected my work with the world at large.
In 2009, it was publishing new poems to Tumblr.
In 2011, it was photography on Flickr and writing on Wordpress.
In 2020, Instagram became the spot where my illustration blew up.
These days, Instagram is still my go-to spot for promoting improv shows and storytelling events.
Having instant access to online platforms for sharing my work helped me get my reps. It allowed me to sharpen my creative skills while having a space to unpack different storylines in my life.
But the good doesn’t outweigh the bad like it used to. This year, I am hopeful to significantly scale back my usage. And that’s going to mean reconfiguring my creative process a bit.
I drew a month’s worth of illustrations in about a week. Whenever I sat down to write, the words flowed freely. Making videos felt easier than usual.
There was a lot to make. And the time off work gave me the chance to work on it.
Plus, transitioning from one year to the next makes you look backward and forward at the same time. You get to take a few steps back and see life from a wider lens than you typically do. That sort of big-picture perspective is a great one from a creative standpoint.
So yeah, things were flowing freely.
Even more importantly, making them felt fun. Bringing things in my head to life on paper had some real flow. And at the moment, it actually didn’t seem to matter that much how I would publish, share, distribute, promote, or get this stuff out there. At least for a little bit, what mattered was simply bringing them into existence.
Of course, creative life isn’t always like that. Artists make things to be seen and heard. Sure, a lot of us would bristle at the idea of being attention-seeking, but we do want some people on the receiving end of our work. There’s something about performing for an empty audience that feels a bit pointless.
But more often than not, the process of making art and the process of sharing it have felt like separate spheres.
One gives energy, one takes.
One feels fun, the other like a chore.
And as I post another illustration for my five-digit following, only to see that the algorithm only delivered to a couple dozen of them, the latter feels increasingly pointless.
I came of age when social media was a brand new puppy, ready to be fed with cryptic emo song lyrics and much more innocent feeling memes.
In my quest to turn down the volume of social media, I’ve been asking myself… how would I promote this stuff if it were 2003?
It takes me back to the time where, as a middle schooler, I was on a school trip to New York and a man on the street handed me his mixtape. DaFear. His CD had four tracks, respectively named Track01, Track02, and so on. My seventh grade self was so amused, probably because the subject matter was a bad pairing with my maturity level at the time. But hey, DaFear. I respect the hustle.
If music were my main gig, I don’t know if I would be using quite that same method as DaFear, but I would be trying to go where the people are and to get in front of them. Open mic nights. Coffee shops. One of my favorite performances was a friend of mine who convinced a bakery in 2009 to let him plug in and play for an evening. He invited so many of us it turned into this cozy gathering of friends.
Does that make his stuff do numbers the way it might’ve via Bandcamp? Probably not. But I do know I still listen to his stuff 15 years later, which is more than I can say for many social media discoveries of the era.
If your goal is to massively blow up as an artist, I don’t know if this is a complete strategy. But if you want an audience and want to have more fun, it’s at least a good start.
A few years ago I dropped in as an audience member.
A couple years ago, I started classes, graduated, and even took on some electives.
Over the past few years I’ve joined a few indie teams and made a house team.
These days I perform about one show every week.
And since it’s always about the friends we make along the way, I gotta say, it’s given me a good community of people I see on a regular basis.
So basically, this little indie improv theatre has been a place where I can watch others perform, a place where I can learn and get my reps, a place where I can take the stage, and a place where I can hang with my friends. It’s a dojo, a studio, a stage, and a pub all in one.
Makes for a pretty efficient way to get a lot of the things we’re used to turning to social media for.
Improv likely isn’t the thing I consider my primary art form, though it has climbed up the ranks. But my experience with it has made me wish for spaces that offered that for other areas of my creative life.
A place to write alongside writer friends and share and give feedback.
A place to debut digital videos and watch other people’s.
A place for oral storytelling.
In some cases, these things exist. I know of music studios that are very community oriented. Open mics are routine and they give you a chance to meet others to jam with. The world of rec sports has been pretty good at this for a while.
That in-the-flesh, offline activity will solidify itself as some sort of status symbol, flexing both one’s material privilege in having the time for it, alongside one’s inner willpower to resist the cheap dopamine hits.
Perhaps! I don’t really like to live in the world of speculation. But I do know that over the past 18 months I’ve been telling my team at work to keep exploring ways to promote our work beyond social media. And that I’ve been putting my phone on grayscale to add some friction between myself and the apps. (It’s a good lifehack. Would recommend.)
While the problems with social media are clear, figuring out replacements for its role in our creative lives remains a bit murky. And even though uploading my illustrations to the gram for six reactions feels like shooting it off into the ether, it still feels like I’ve shot my shot.
But the reality is, it’d likely get more than six reactions if I printed one out and put it up in an auto mechanic’s wait area.
Maybe that’s the sort of out of the box thinking that this next chapter of creative endeavors will call for.
Last month, I got a message from a friend looking to book an improv team to perform… at a restaurant. (In my imagination, it’s a dim sum, and the improv scenes need to accommodate wheeled carts of steamed buns and noodles.)
I think more struggling small businesses might be a good partner for struggling small artists. It just takes the initiative to ask the banh mi shop owner if your artist collective could meet there twice a month. Heck, I saw a busker perform at a barbershop during my last haircut.
Forget bringing back Third Spaces, let’s bend the rules entirely and make Ninth Spaces on top of Fifths.
There’s a lot of art to be made. More stories and songs within ya. And more people who need to see it and more people to create alongside. The world is changing, but that part hasn’t.
DaFear, if you’re reading this, lemme hop on a track.
BLACK HISTORY DROP
The original cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black, both cattle and herdsmen are genetically linked to Africa’s Fulani tribe.
Post-Emancipation, one of the most available work opportunities for men was cattle herding and breeding. The term cowboy was a slur, that gradually got reappropriated.
In the early 1900s, Bill Pickett emerged as a rodeo star, being one of the earliest Black movie stars.
When the world feels chaotic and absurdist and a bit like that over-the-top melee scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s helpful to remember that it’s all just a set up for Ke Huy Quan’s monologue:
“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned how to survive…this is how I fight.”
The disgust and overwhelm… it’s reasonable, but also by design. It’s harder for people to stand up for each other when they’re burned out, and people who benefit from injustice know that. Here are some tips to not get played:
Focus on your area of impact and go deep. It’s so much better than chasing the latest outrage around in circles. For things that feel a little more out of reach, find some orgs already doing work and show them some love.
Spend more time with people. In person. Don’t be isolated. Some nights you’ll feel like you have to push yourself a little bit, but it’s worth it in the end.
Remember that the news will show you a lot of terrible things, but it won’t remind you that somebody got their first kiss this week and feels a thousand feet tall. Or that some kid just discovered The Fugees for the first time. Or that some grandparent is getting to course correct regrets they had with their own kids.
And know that it’s sometimes hard to find foods in the center of the good-for-you and tastes-good venn diagram, but kimchi exists and lives in that space.
In my dad era, I don’t get to go out to see live music too often. That’s made me get a little too precious about the shows I go to, wanting to use these rare occasions to see longtime favorite artists.
But you know what?
There’s something special about going to see an artist whose work you don’t know inside-out. An artist whose vibe you’re familiar with, who you’re confident can put on a show, just one you haven’t spent a ton of time with. Then going to their show and getting treated to a p e r f o r m a n c e.
This was Tank and the Bangas last night. They get the party going.
Good taste starts early.
Weekend events: Took the big twin out on a ramen centric field trip and wound up watching the halftime show from a sports fan gear store by the border.
Also worked on a mural.
Probably gonna have to retire from nonprofit marketing now that the perfect fundraiser has already been done.
The past week the whole feed has been like:
What marketers can learn from Kendrick Lamar
What event coordinators can learn from Kendrick Lamar
What couples wanting to improve communication can learn from Kendrick Lamar
What suburban beekeepers can learn from Kendrick Lamar
And I’m not mad at it.
Given what the feed has looked like since mid-January, please keep it coming. I can’t wait to achieve the perfect at-home puff pastry by learning from Kendrick Lamar.
The downside to tracking flights the way I do is having full visibility of all the great deals I can’t take.
$550 to Amsterdam. Saw a $800 round trip from San Diego to Senegal this month. I have yet to do West Africa.
Daddy daughter date with the bear who never lets us down.
While 1&2 set an almost impossibly high bar, happy to say 3 does a pretty good job keeping up. Antonio Banderas was a good pick to pick up Hugh Grant’s goofy villain baton. The diaspora/immigration themes are a bit more pronounced in Peru, but to good effect.
Stumbled upon a used toys store in town recently. Replay Toys. The people running this shop have a good thing going on! Store full of throwback gems. Not quite flea market prices, but a very good likelihood you’ll encounter a childhood fave you forgot about. Spent over an hour in here with Rhys just exploring and could’ve spent longer.
I’ve been really digging this EP.
If you’re in the mood for some real simple, sweet songwriter indie with clever lines, don’t miss out on corner club.
I made some booch!
Happy with the results considering this was my first attempt ever. Went with chopped mango and mango-habanero syrup to feed my second fermentation.
Notes:
Fresh fruit is my preference for the second fermentation since it seems to produce the best carbonation.
I’m on my third batch now using the same mother and it’s getting better flavor each round.
No need to overcomplicate what good work looks like.
Make it about something bigger than yourself and love the process. Be more invested in being fully present to the process than the results.
I feel like my reading has been light lately, but here are some recent standouts…
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry – I picked this up because Min Jin Lee cited it as a key inspiration for Pachinko, one of my all time faves. It’s similar in its epic scale, this time weaving a story through the lives of a whole bunch of characters over a few decades min India.
I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer – Youngmi’s unrestrained honesty has always been a hallmark of her comedy and it translates really well into memoir.
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer – Kimmerer does what she’s proven to do extremely well… take nature’s lessons and put them into some gorgeous and compelling writing.
Playground by Richard Power – I loved The Overstory and had high hopes for this. Some things I thought worked really well. I like that he went for a more lighthearted tone compared to The Overstory. He pulls some familiar moves, like interpolating a character based on a real world scientist, and I wish the tech themes were toned down since those also featured so prominently in The Overstory.
James by Percival Everett – The hype is real on this one. Loved the character of James and the whole conversation around performance that keeps coming back around.
Those misty morning runs
This year, I feel like I’ve seen a bunch of people remark how long things have felt. One month feels like an eternity. Especially January!
But we all know in December we’ll all be freaking out perplexed about how the end’s already here and we’re in the latter half of the decade.
Learning how to appreciate the boring times and liminal spaces makes life so much bigger.
