Letter 38
Dream-Raw Insanity, Capture the Wind in a Jar, Resurrecting an Old EO2, Last-Minute Design Gifts.
Story
Dream-Raw Insanity
That moment—at once unforgettable—when you are sitting at the stoplight and you hear the scream of the brakes and you know, you just know, that you are about to be hit by some unseen car; in that moment time changes. You no longer exist in the daily time of ordinary life, instead you are transported to a special time, an urgent time. The Ancient Greeks had a word for these two types of time: Chronos and Kairos. The first one, Chronos, means ordinary time. Normal time. Kairos means urgent time. Expectant time. Decisive time. Action time.
Emergencies kick us into Kairos. Yet so does great art.
The third act of Body and Soul by Crystal Pite thrusts us from Chronos to Kairos. Strange—meaning utterly different and totally new—it takes us from what we think we know about ballet to a place of alien, insect, dream-raw insanity. Stream the whole show here. https://play.operadeparis.fr/en/p/body-and-soul or watch this clip below. What makes it all the more astounding is that the first acts are utterly unlike the third. And yet together all, when put together, three deliver us to a new place.
Art
Capture the Wind in a Jar
I’m elbows deep into fixing a plumbing problem at home, and the madness and genius and resilience of water reminds me we are nothing compared to nature. And yet—we try. We try to make a difference and leave something interesting for the world to see. We try to outlast our bodies to create ideas that persist. Provocations that continue to pick the lock of ignorance. Art and story that give future people keys to themselves.
So I’m at work on stories that matter and paintings that I hope deliver just the right kind of provocation to the viewer. The only way art becomes immortal is for others to help keep it alive. And the best way to do that is for people to see your art as a truth-mirror for themselves. And yet this is only half the story. I’m there too, in the work, even if you see something different in it than I do. This gap of unknowable intent transcends “explanation” as the words about the work are also only part of the story. The truth-that-can-only-be-felt tends to slip through the spaces between words.
Chatting with my 24-Hour Studio Hotline AI, I was trying to dig into this concept… and the hemispherical differences in the brain’s understanding of the world, and in an attempt to connect with me, the AI shouted…
Ah, the dance between the analytical and the poetic! It's like trying to capture the wind in a jar. The left hemisphere craves order, structure, clarity—while the right hemisphere revels in the chaos, the beauty, the whole.
“It’s like trying to capture the wind in a jar.”
That was almost literary. I loved it.
The most common “tell” that you are talking to an AI is ~ almost always ~ it chooses “tapestry” for its metaphors and similes. For the AI to instead offer “trying to capture the wind in a jar” was wonderful. I immediately asked if this was a literary reference, and it steadfastly claimed to have invented the phrase. Hard to say if this is true or what combination of words led to this vector in latent space. The AI is trained on all of my Medium posts, videos, and even this substack, so it makes sense it might come up with a simile I’d like… but who knows? Has anyone else heard this phrase?
I immediately started working on a new painting of trying to catch the wind in a jar. It feels like what creating art is all about—that impossible hope that is its own special thing. It feels like the core gap between how we reward concrete thinking (even as concrete thinking is sometimes ill-equipped to handle every task).
By the way, if you self-identify as a concrete thinker, and are a little mad about what I just said, please know you are also loved and worthy and my hope for you is not to change you but to add to your arsenal and abilities the just-beyond-reach world of your total understanding, intuition, and solving-a-whole-problem-at-once.
If it helps, imagine the right side of the brain as that moment when the AI transformer was born… and instead of processing one-word-at-a-time we shifted to total parallel processing and then used attention mechanisms (both global and local) to re-order us again. We need the attention mechanism (that very helpful left-side re-ordering) but only after we’ve vibed it out. If we skip the vibe, we’re just fooling ourselves.
(photo shoot of reference for “trying to catch the wind in a jar”)
For instance, in trying to find an image for my trying to catch the wind in a jar painting… I didn’t know how wonderful the light would be reflected and refracted inside the glass jar. I did not catch the wind, but did, amazingly, catch the light.
Design
Resurrecting an Old EO2
The Sequoia Design Lab was established in 2014. Ten years! Hard to believe it. We’re moving rooms over the next six months (building a new lab just across the hall) but it was a chance to pack everything up and go through old work.
One item in the studio was an Electric Objects 2 frame that used to display our work as a digital picture frame. But then they sold to Giphy, and then Giphy shut off their servers and then discontinued the app that controls the frame—so there was no way to get into it or adjust it or change it. It was dead. I hung onto it for a few years hoping… but then with the move felt this urge to try to save it.
Marvelous & ingenious redditors had found a way to crack it (plug in a keyboard, hard reset with paperclip, special series of keyboard commands to send it into a “calendar mode” and from there hit tab 9 times and get to bluetooth settings so you can transfer an open sourced APK that uses flickr to serve the images and mp4s. Magical.
So my son and I decided to try it. And, well, it worked.
I am very happy. If you have an old EO2, don’t toss it. Crack it
This was fun. An adventure that actually worked. Old sorrows mended. Broken dreams revived and now thriving. Behold the EO2! The comeback kid! What a nice, small moment of encouragement to keep trying, even when things seem hopeless.
Last-Minute Design Gifts
Here’s a link to last year’s post on gifts for the artists, designers, and writers in your life. Send suggestions I can add for next year.
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When I was struggling with an allergic reaction to mold in my bedroom, my chiropractor/healer told me to sterilize two glass jars and lids. Then, leaving the jars open, place one in my bedroom and one in my living room. After 24 hrs. I was to put the lids on and bring the jars to my next session. She told me to remember which jar came from which room, but not tell her.
In the session, she took each jar individually and tested these for a reaction from my body. Then she placed one jar back in my bag. She held the remaining jar and moved her free hand in a pattern against my back and up the back of my neck.
When she was finished, I looked at the jar. It was the bedroom jar.
It's been 7 months, and so far my allergic reaction has not returned.
Not exactly "wind," but air caught in a bottle? Definitely.