Hi friends,
Today, an attempt at a lackadaisical newsletter. A tangled Tiktok feed from my mind to your inbox. Now entering algo-free zone; proceed at your own risk.
the view from the other side
Everyone looks a little more silly upside down. Brooklyn Bridge Park in the spring is where I reintroduce my body to supported handstands, after a winter of unsupported headjams.
Everyone should look at the world upside down. Because when friends have babies and friends get surgery, and then eight people are shot at your childhood mall next to the suburb rated safest in America, nothing is right side up.
how are you? i am a crumpled up ball of passion
everyone can't do everything all at once
reminder! translated from the original danish, from illustrator line jensen
optimization can stop the bleeding, but it can't raise the dead
"A fully self-contained indie band that comes bundled with an experienced publicist, booking agent, and tour manager has obvious advantages over groups that do nothing but play music. The strategy is to operate with low overhead, to refine your project until the margins are sleek and aerodynamic enough to fit through the applicable bottlenecks. The band’s ability to turn a profit on the road seems miraculous given the wasteland of misery and failure that the American touring landscape has become after COVID, but the methods are still basically triage. Optimization can stop the bleeding, but it can’t raise the dead.
...
Those who have benefitted the most from ours have already started the process of consolidating the shattered wreckage of our culture industries into the one singular, unified form factor they believe the future will have room for. It will collapse art, entertainment, pornography, social media, dating apps, and gambling into an endless “algorithmic” feed of low-effort, low-quality clickbait optimized for engagement at the cost of addiction. In the past, halting this kind of “progress” required a two year nationwide ban on recording organized by the American Federation of Musicians. Absent that kind of collective action, the people who own everything will keep dragging us towards the event horizon regardless of what we want. Any other story we tell ourselves about how this all works is just a coping strategy."
grim and close to death are good enough
"At the moment, we have enough cash for two more issues, which sounds grim, but in the literary world, grim and close to death are good enough. Surely, there must be some kind of middle ground between wealthy benefactors and galas, and labors of love that slowly burn out in front of everyone. Surely, there must be some way out of these woods." —M.M. Carrigan
the collected schizophrenias, a book you should read
"I believe in redefining ambition to better include people living with limitations like chronic illness and disability." — Esmé Weijun Wang
my toxic trait is i believe in technology
thought it's at least nice to find practitioners who write, outside the american startup circuit. i smiled at cedric chin's description of his The Chinese Businessmen Paradox series: "I helped build a business from 0 to ~$4.5 million dollars in annual revenue from the end of 2014 to the end of 2017, and in the process dealt with a lot of traditional Chinese businessmen. They were savvy, ruthlessly competitive, and mostly uneducated. This is a series of posts that attempts to make sense of the businessmen I dealt with."
because when i read "chinese businessmen paradox" i immediately thought: ah yes, the business methodology where FIRST you get drunk together THEN you make millions.
like joan didion stamping the martha stewart empire with a "proprietary intimacy." it's not on the P&L sheets but i can confirm that intimacy improves the bottom line.
some recent words at work i enjoyed editing
the difference between bad data and good data, with checkout.com
how global creative shops do b2b research, with r/ga and landor & fitch
language is a place for love to go
i loved reading from Michelle Luo on relearning Chinese:
“My friend Bill told me it’s typical for writers—and lawyers, probably—to feel more shame when they try to master a new language: we’re so much harder on ourselves. We’re fussy about words because we care about them. And we’re repulsed by mundane usage, even though mundane usage is the core of language learning. “The answer is,” he said, “be dumber in English.”
I think he was onto something. At the heart of the idea of mastery is the ideal of dominion. This is precisely what Albert instinctively, emphatically refuses. Learning a language, he knows, should not be about dominion.”
i spent easter weekend being dumber in chinese, while traveling with my cousin's family based in munich. they are very smart in chinese and it only made me more aware how unwitty and unsophisticated i am in chinese. but then it struck me - isn't this what i wanted? to still my mind to do less, listen to the kids wail nooooo in German (neeeein!), marvel at how language is a place for love to go*, no matter how crude?
*phrase from poet Allison Benis White
bloomer: my summer art project
poetry updates - i made it out of workshop alive and spent a lot of hours processing by myself, sitting in front of large bodies of water and realized -
i've been working on a thing — i think i'm calling it BLOOMER — that i'm jazzed to share over the coming months. it sits somewhere between an album and a poetry collection. what do you call 8 poems with images and sound attached? an emotional acid trip. fun and frightening for me to make, just fun for you to consume.
my writing ethos inspired by:
adam haslett: "...if no serious internal trouble has been overcome in the writing of a book, then there’s not a lot of blood on the floor, and it’s not as interesting to me."
james baldwin: “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up, all of it, the literal and the fanciful."
planning to publish a new visual-audio-poem-thing every couple weeks over at poems.vickygu.com, or whenever i finish writing/producing. here's to low stakes summer projects - reply and let me know what you’re working on?
an eternal thanks to my paid newsletter subscribers for enabling my art, and gratitude to anyone who follows it (hi, you!). if anything i make strikes you, please react or reply. i love replies.
want more?
Feel free to like and comment below, and you can always reach me at vickygu30@gmail.com.
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