Just Pillows 2, #1
Sea monsters, gangs, October, boda bodas, time travel interview, formatting, simplicity, language, Stripe, Oneohtrix Point Never
Misc
Erm, uhm, so these exist…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oarfish
Studio Gane/Jeanne Gang
https://studiogang.com/
I recently went on a knockoff Chicago architecture tour and during it they pointed out the Vista Tower and Aqua Tower as tallest buildings designed by a woman. They failed to mention that the architect Jeanne Gang also designed a bunch of other cool stuff around Chicago and across the country:
https://studiogang.com/project/vista-tower
https://studiogang.com/project/aqua-tower
https://studiogang.com/project/nature-boardwalk-at-lincoln-park-zoo
https://studiogang.com/project/ohare-global-terminal
https://studiogang.com/project/eleanor-boathouse-at-park-571
https://studiogang.com/project/wms-boathouse-at-clark-park
https://studiogang.com/project/rescue-company-2
Happy Oct
Boda boda belt
Please introduce me to actuaries and physical scientists
Not quite misc, not quite stuff time travel interview
Stuff
Essay about formatting graphs
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/11/13/remove-the-legend
One of my favorite things I have read this year. Some practical tips but more interestingly a meditation on the process and purpose of gathering, presenting, and sharing information.
The art of keeping it simple, by JPMorgan’s Jan Loeys
via FT Alphaville
This was actually nicely readable and actionable? And a fun little 3 minute linkedin video to boot! I’ll take it. Just remember to round this out with large bets on buddies moonshots and massive amounts of crypto exposure.
1. How many assets do you really need in your long-term portfolio?
In principle, you do not really need more than two: a global equity fund and a broad bond fund in your own currency, with the relative amounts a function of your return needs, ability to withstand short-term drawdowns, and need to control long-term risk on your ultimate portfolio. This gives you very good diversification, clarity and simplicity on what you are holding, and high liquidity with minimum costs if held through passive funds, mutual or exchange traded (ETFs).
Language and Perspective
I find it endlessly fascinating how my understanding of the “whole world” is so influenced by English and fundamentally different than someone who speaks a different language.
For example, I love the math youtube channel 3blue1brown. So when I recently stumbled on Scientia Egregia via a French speaker I found the resemblance between the two channels delightful.
A number of factors may explain this pattern of cross-country distribution of preferences. Language is certainly a factor, with anglophone countries perhaps more likely to be exposed to American media and entertainment, and therefore more partial to the U.S.
Stripe is an interesting company [xx]
Stripe is an interesting company 1: https://stratechery.com/2020/stripe-platform-of-platforms/
Stripe is an interesting company 2: https://www.thediff.co/archive/stripe/
Stripe is an interesting company 3: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/10/09/four-years-at-stripe/#fnref:ic
Music
Song that Mac Demarco apparently loves which is unsurprising
OPN
I'm not a huge Oneohtrix Point Never fan or anything but I thought new album rocked and lived up to the hype. This New Yorker article was both funny and informative: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/the-emotionally-haunted-electronic-music-of-oneohtrix-point-never
Some highlights:
A Barely Lit Path’s lyrics: If I empty my mind / Do I scoop out my skull / What gifts would I find / Nothing’s inside / Just a slug that provides / A barely lit path/ From your house to mine.
For more than a decade, Lopatin has been a highly regarded composer within electronic-music circles, and worshipped in certain corners of the Internet. But recently he has become the person mainstream pop stars call when their records are getting boring, rote, or predictable. Lopatin has collaborated with FKA Twigs, Caroline Polachek, Arca, Rosalía, Charli XCX, Anohni, and Nine Inch Nails, among others. In 2022, he produced “Sometimes, Forever,” Soccer Mommy’s third album.
“any sort of music that makes your vision blur, or gets the mind soft enough to see God.”
“Attempting to define vaporwave is sort of humiliating: like most Web-based phenomena, it deploys an idiosyncratic grammar that remains mostly inscrutable to anyone who has recently gone outside. The visuals tend to involve 3-D graphics, screen savers, dolphins, dead malls, VHS tapes, corporate training videos, bad graphic design, and Greco-Roman statues. The primary instruments are synthesizers and YouTube. There’s a kind of aching pathos to some of it. If you’ve ever wandered around a flea market and felt a peculiar pang after coming across, say, an inkjet printer from 2008, an old cable box, or an unopened Sony MiniDisc player, you know what I mean: the accelerated obsolescence of commercial technology can feel like a kind of memento mori. Nothing is relevant forever.”
Art itself shouldn’t have a specialized language,” he said. “Sculpture, especially, seems really, really metaphorically aligned with music.” He continued, “There’s this artist named Gordon Hall. I went to college with them, and we were very close. I went to a lecture of theirs many years ago, at the SculptureCenter, in Long Island City. Gordon’s, like, ‘Here’s a chair,’ and showed a picture of a chair. And then it was, like, ‘Here’s an abstract sculpture.’ The chair, it infers the human body. So what body is inferred when you look at an abstract sculpture? There’s an identity aspect to that part of the work for Gordon, but there’s a really universal lesson in there as well, which is: What can new forms of art teach us about new worlds we want to build, new bodies, whatever? I saw that chair and I saw that sculpture and I said, ‘Yep. I’m in the sculpture business. I’m not in the chair business.’ ”
“One Friday afternoon, Lopatin and I met at the Storm King Art Center, a five-hundred-acre sculpture garden in the Hudson Highlands, about an hour from Manhattan. The center’s collection includes large-scale pieces by artists like Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Serra, and Louise Bourgeois, plunked onto grassy knolls. That day, the paths were filled with couples, presumably from Brooklyn, presumably giggling through a third or fourth date.”
For the cover of “Again,” (picture) Lopatin commissioned an original piece by the Norwegian sculptor Matias Faldbakken after seeing his “Locker Sculpture #2,” in which a row of collapsing metal lockers are squeezed together by ratchet straps. It’s as though the lockers were being hugged to death.
Super Bowl:
“I think together we’ve created some of the most genre-bending music of my career.” The Weeknd’s “Dawn FM,” which was co-executive-produced, in 2022, by Lopatin, Tesfaye, and the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, feels like a spiritual rejoinder to “Magic Oneohtrix Point Never”—both records are obsessed with crackly, outmoded FM radio as a comforting but almost supernatural force. “Dawn FM” is full of strange and slippery moments (pitch-shifted vocals, arched melodies, warped synthesizers, existential duress) that are captivating to encounter on the pop chart.
When the Weeknd was tapped to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show in February, 2021, Tesfaye asked Lopatin to be his musical director. “He said, ‘We’ll figure it out.’ That’s my language,” Lopatin said. The performance still feels singular among halftime shows. It was a dark and paranoid moment for the American psyche: covid was raging, and the Capitol had been breached the month before. Because of the pandemic, more than half of Raymond James Stadium, in Tampa, was occupied by cardboard cutouts. Tesfaye bounced around a hall of mirrors filled with avatars of himself, their faces bandaged, singing about love as an utterly obliterating force. Then, suddenly, he was bopping around a platform, grinning, while fireworks went off, singing a song about romantic bliss. It was a thrilling mix of perverse and sunny.
When I asked Lopatin if he was on the field that night, he said, “There’s this big pirate ship behind one of the end zones, and I was in the pirate ship.” He continued, “My therapist calls me ‘Motherfucker.’ We have a whole thing. He was, like, ‘Motherfucker’—he’s from Texas—‘Motherfucker, I’m old, I’m a bag of bones. You’d better bring me something back from that pirate ship, because I love Tom Brady!’ ” He laughed. “I got all this thread from the rope holding up the fake sail, and I put it in this little Plexiglas thing for him. If you’re gonna steal, steal a tiny thread. Steal the smallest thing you can find.”
“One morning, he texted me a song by the singer and producer Marcus Brown, who records as Nourished by Time. The track, “Shed That Fear,” [see below] features a chipper but celestial synth line that made me feel like my body was a helium balloon recently let loose by a child. Lopatin described it as “Arthur Russell meets Daft Punk but deep R. & B.” and the “only new music I absolutely swear is next level.””
Even the name he records under—Oneohtrix Point Never—is a mondegreen, a mishearing of a radio-station call (Magic 106.7) from his youth.
a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song.