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🎨 Recently discovered and can’t stop thinking about Kimiyo Mishima’s amazing ceramic work that replicates printed, cardboard, or breakable material.

Incredible commentary on commodification, overproduction, and the information age. You can also find a simple, insightful interview with her here.

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💬 Duchamp’s short essay on The Creative Act (1957) is a good read for people who like to think about art, but also inadvertently gives one of the best arguments for why utilizing AI generation is so detrimental to an artist’s development:

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal ‘art coefficient’ contained in the work. In other words, the personal ‘art coefficient’ is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

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🎥 I also watched the horror film Undertone today, and while I normally skip making bad reviews, I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to use this video clip for a while. Pretty much sums it up. 🤣

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🎥 Just watched Hamnet in the movie theatres. Deserves a full blog post, but want to get my thoughts off before Oscars. Here are my first thoughts:

Ezra Pound once wrote that “beauty is a brief gasp between two cliches.” Hamnet is a story that braves the perilous path of a very cliched time period, but finds the gasps with a frequency that can only be attributed to great artistry. The triumph of the picture is that it successfully earns the audience’s submersion into the dirty, odorous, and oppressive Elizabethan era. Most notably, and absolutely central to the main theme, is how the people from this time period live in constant proximity to death. Things are always dying—and dying near to us. Modern society is so sanitized and anything that might conjure a memento mori is banished without question. Hamnet, however, let’s the Grim Reaper play the lead and cast his very large shadow over every scene. By doing so, director Chloe Zhao earns the moments that, in my estimation, can only be described as hope-filled magic. The story is ultimately a revolving door—a continual turning over of heartbreak, hope, and heartbreak in rapid succession. If you have ever been touched by grief or healed by goodness, you’ll be familiar with the pattern.

Lastly, all the actors are brilliant (even Joe Alwyn). Paul Mescal has never performed better and the children actors conducted themselves like veterans. Jessie Buckley was on another level though. Her performance was both elegant and transcendent, and deserves to be given its flowers because, for the last 8-10 years, it’s become very popular to make films that somewhat disparage mothers. Thus, it lightened my soul to see such a believable depiction of a wild and free-spirited mother who is somehow bold, independent, intelligent, emotional, and whimsical while still being fiercely loyal, humble, and grounded. Well done.

I may feel differently about this tomorrow, but it is certainly how I feel about it today.

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✍️ Back in October, I wrote a dark fiction fable that included a brief rant from an unhinged tech CEO about the connection between war and business. Yesterday morning, Alex Karp of Palantir was on CNBC making the exact same arguments:

On the battlefield, on the commercial battlefield, too, at large companies… our ability to target and take out adversaries and enemies in a way no one else can. I mean, from a not moral perspective, they’re exactly the same; what makes you lethal on the battlefield, and what makes you commercially viable?”

I’m not prescient—this is just how these guys think. They are terribly misguided, even if commercially successful.

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💬 From the saintly Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace:

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. Attention is bound up with desire. Not with the will but with desire—or more exactly, consent. We liberate energy in ourselves, but it constantly reattaches itself. How are we to liberate it entirely? We have to desire that it should be done in us—to desire it truly—simply to desire it, not to try to accomplish it. Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn. Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

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🎵 3 songs recommended/shown to me by friends this week:

Just a reminder that both my 2025 and my 2026 listens are public. They are disparate playlists, but you are guaranteed a few gems.

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🎥 The Oscars are this weekend, so wanted to repost my predictions. I feel so-so about them, but no changing up now!

I will say that I was never crazy about Marty Supreme and even it’s best qualities have lessened in my mind since I first watched. I have yet to see Hamnet. OBAA is still my fav.

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🎮 I am not much of a gamer, and I don’t typically enjoy jokes that are at other people’s expense. But… the game trailer for Karen, a self-described “3D action beat-em-up sandbox game where players will embody a disgruntled Karen who’s been denied service to her satisfaction” was so, so funny to me.

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📚 These books are next in my reading queue. From Books Are Magic in BK Heights, as usual.

I confess that both titles come from an interview Ezra Klein did with Priya Parker. I’m normally chary about these types of recs, but I was so impressed with Priya that I decided to take a risk on it.

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🎵 Been listening to this week:

There was a bonus track on the Baby Keem CD called “Tubi” that I wanted to share, but it doesn’t exist online. I had a link, then it got taken down… Sorry 🤷‍♂️ That’s the benefit of physical media though. Buy your music! Don’t rent!

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✍️ I can smell your aura, a new blog post from yours truly is out now.

As far as I can tell, these are sense-words; adjectives meant to describe an effect that we feel but can’t necessarily link to a specific visual trait. It’s like supercalifragilisticexpealidocious, but for attentional faculties. It’s what we say when we don’t know what to say.

I pull on everything from Ivan Illich to Frank Sinatra to Gandalf to explain pop culture’s misunderstanding of “aura.” These thoughts are half-baked, but hopefully teach something about language, media ecology, and perception.

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👔 You can tell a lot about a person by the intensity or complacency with which they treat the 30-minute mandatory lunch break.

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💬 Nice to come across this very optimistic and well-researched essay on the importance playfulness today:

The most successful communities will embrace play-based gatherings in unexpected ways. In a society so desperately craving permission to connect, play is the forgotten art with the potential to lead to transformative experiences.

But, as someone who has been on the PLAY schtick for a long time, it’s vital that it does not get pigeon-holed into a mere trend or movement. Play is as universal a virtue as patience, justice, or even (as I argued in last week’s blog) love.

Play is the way!

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✏️ New Word Learned:

Encomiast: a person who publicly praises or flatters someone else

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📹🎶 Kota the Friend @ Blue Note, NYC

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💬 African Proverb:

The man who is all eyes sees nothing.

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✌️ Came across a wildly fun video of Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Superbowl performance in American Sign Language from deaf interpreter Jeremy Lee Stone. It’s well worth the watch.

However, it’s his breakdown of the interpretation and explanation for his choices that is easily the most creative thing you’ll see all week. It’s a beautiful blend of artistry, language, and expression. I don’t know sign language, but I feel this gave me an even deeper appreciation for the deaf community.

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✏️ New Word Learned:

Riparian: relating to wetlands adjacent to rivers and streams