Iterations

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that I’ve experienced my fair share of loss over the past 59 years, and each time the wound is reopened so it never really gets a chance to heal. I would even say that grief and loss have become recurring characters in my life, rather than just a single episode walk-on in season 2 — sort of like The Smoking Man from The X-Files. I know that loss will show up again and again, so it’s not really even much of a surprise anymore. I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing it or that I’m comfortable with the arrangement — because as I said, each new loss still hurts — but over the past decade, I’ve been working on carving out a different relationship with it.

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For the better part of a year-and-a-half now, the Supernote Manta has been my daily driver when it comes to writing. Whether I’m journaling, starting a new edition of my newsletter, or simply capturing thoughts and ideas to flesh out later, the Manta is where nearly all of my writing begins.

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I’ve always thought of archives as places where things go when they’re finished. Sort of a record of the past or a cold storage collection of what mattered after the fact. But lately, I’ve started to think of an archive differently. Maybe it isn’t just a repository for things that stop being useful. Maybe it’s also where they start asking new questions. A few weeks ago, I picked up a scanner, which I wrote about in a previous Iteration. Since then, I’ve been scanning all sorts of things without much of a plan. Things like magazine covers, vintage ephemera, and old photographs. I’m not looking for anything in particular, I’m just following my curiosity and trusting that some of these pieces might surface later. Over the last few newsletters, I’ve tried to explore different ways of paying attention. For example, the camera says: “Pay attention to this moment.” The scanner says: “Look closer. There is more here than you thought.” I think the archive says: “Now sit with what you found long enough for it to tell you something you couldn’t hear (or see) at first.”

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So there I was, looking through stacks of receivers, DVD players, and the odd VCR when I spotted something I didn’t recognize. It was big — big enough to cover nearly two receivers. A CD player was sitting on top of it and when I lifted it off, I think I actually gasped, which Adrianne says is a sure sign that you’ve found something good. It was a flatbed scanner made by a company called Viisan, a brand I’d never actually heard of. Epson? Sure. HP? Of course. Microtek? Absolutely. Viisan? Not so much. And like I said, it was big. Most flatbed scanners are letter or legal-sized, but this one was A3, which means it can scan tabloid-sized magazines like my old issues of LIFE and Look in one pass.

LINKS

Goodwill

Homer Laughlin china

Broyhill Brasilia side table

Sansui 9090

Marantz 2270

Viisan

LIFE

Look

Affinity

Print Size Calculator

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When I was a kid, the camera only came out for special occasions. A single roll of film might last months, sometimes longer. Most of the time the camera lived in a cupboard until there was a reason to bring it out. Birthdays. Christmas. Vacations. Graduations. Film wasn’t something you wasted, so every frame had to justify itself. Back then, the camera itself felt almost mysterious. My father loved machines of every kind, especially engines, and while I didn’t inherit his expertise, through him I became fascinated by how things worked. But a camera seemed different. It wasn’t just a machine. Somehow, it could stop time. It could preserve a moment long after the moment had passed. I didn’t understand how it worked at the time, only that it felt capable of something almost magical.

What’s your instrument? What do you find yourself noticing? How does that curiosity find its way into your work — or your life?

I’d love to hear from you. Email me at [email protected].

LINKS

YashicaMat 124G

William Eggleston

Pentax Super Program

Maarten Rots

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I've built more personal websites than I care to count, starting with my first one back in 1997. For years, the goal was simple — keep it fresh, keep it updated, keep the portfolio current enough to land the next job. I picked that habit up partly from Jakob Nielsen, the usability researcher who was convinced sites needed to feel alive to repeat visitors, and I ran with it — random hero images in early Javascript, the same trick later in ActionScript when Flash took over, even a menu I built as a cloth simulation in LightWave 3D for a site about Western furniture I designed with my dad.

This time around, I'm talking about what changed. My last major site overhaul was the move to Carrd back in 2021, and the WordPress redesign I've been slow-walking for months isn't slow because I'm stuck — it's slow because the urgency that used to drive it just isn't there anymore. I'm not trying to convince anyone to hire me. I'm not chasing what's current. I'm more interested now in curating and archiving the work I've already done than in creating something new to prove a point.

LINKS

Jakob Nielsen

Adobe (Macromedia) Flash

universalstudios.com

Carrd

Lightwave 3D

Blender

My 3D Cloth Demo in Blender

Gary Vee

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"We're not geniuses, we're just regular guys who are interested in things." — Neil Peart

On August 1st, 2015, Rush played their final show at the Forum in LA. I was there, just as I had been for so many Rush shows over the years. That show felt different — special in a way that we weren’t really prepared for. For months leading up to it, there were rumors that this would be the last show and after the final encore of “Working Man,” when Neil came out from behind his drum kit to take a bow with Alex and Geddy, the rumors became true. Over 40 years and thousands of shows, Neil never took a bow out front — instead, he just put down his sticks and quietly left the stage. As he wrote in “Limelight,” he simply couldn’t pretend a stranger was a long-awaited friend.

I've been following a thread for over 40 years that started with a borrowed Rush record and led me to books, ideas, and work I couldn't have predicted. This iteration is about where that thread goes when you really pull it.

LINKS

Rush

Rush live 6/7/26 in Los Angeles (Full Show)

Neil Peart “Innerview” w/Jim Ladd (1980)

Neil Peart’s last interview w/ Jim Ladd (2015)

Neil Peart on Moving Pictures w/Strombo

Rush Article Archive

Neil Peart’s Favorite Books of All Time

Hugh Syme

Roger Dean

Storm Thorgerson

Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis

Mick Rock

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For most of my life, I’ve been trying to reconcile two very different ideas about success. One was rooted in practicality, achievement, and outcomes. The other was rooted in curiosity, learning, and exploration.

In this episode, I look back at a question my mother asked me during my senior year of high school, the unexpected lessons hidden in a lifetime of creative work, and why I’ve come to realize that what I wanted was never really a career at all. It was a way of living.

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"Sometimes the thing you’re skilled at needs to be broken a little before it can surprise you again."

For the past several years, I’ve primarily identified as a painter, despite the fact that the most consistent work I’ve done is writing. That said, lately I’ve had the uncomfortable thought that I might not want to paint anymore — at least not the way I’ve been doing it. Not because I’ve lost interest entirely, but maybe because I haven’t lost it enough. I can pretty consistently make paintings that “work” on some level, and, honestly, that might be part of the problem.

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Lately I’ve been feeling the weight of how complicated everything seems — I even wrote a bit about it in the last Iteration. It seems that the scale of it all — the speed, the certainty, the volume — can often make even small efforts feel almost invisible. I’ve caught myself wondering whether the things that I make or the conversations I have matter in any “real” way, and honestly, that unsettles me. And I suspect I’m not the only one who’s felt that.

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