Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lady and Stater.
Speaker: Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
Speaker: Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver, and Joseph Wilcox.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: This week's guest is Mike Varley.
Speaker: Mike Varley has recently returned to the craft of About Me writing after a number of years that will henceforth be known as About Less.
Speaker: He's become aware through querying his senses that writing a bio two days before the end of a calendar year will garishly color the contents to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.
Speaker: Nevertheless, he has opened a cherry Coke for the occasion despite the fact it is neither the time of day nor the will of God.
Speaker: 18 months ago, Mike walked 7,024 miles around the five boroughs of New York City, roughly 4,216 of those with his now-wife Jessie Hyatt.
Speaker: He has spent most days since reliving the experience via digital documentation.
Speaker: a testament to his dedication to never settle on an evident trajectory.
Speaker: Recently he's learned that the act of entertaining, scheduling, performing, and supplementing radio newsprint and television interviews is a surprisingly time-consuming task but worth the effort if you get to meet Al Roker.
Speaker: Please don't bite Mike Varley.
Speaker: He has no patience for doctors.
Speaker: If you must know, Mike Varley has made feature films, novellas, music videos, Halloween masks, electrical cord paintings, AAA video games, podcasts, audiobooks, and this one time, a tiny hut made out of no more than 20 cotton swabs.
Speaker: He is pleased to have kept this brief podcast bonus special.
Speaker: If you'd like to receive a free promo NFT from Hailey Barlet's Weed Bags of New York Project, email us at info at lydianstater.co with your Ethereum wallet address and we will send you one.
Speaker: With that, welcome Mike.
Speaker: What's up Mike?
Speaker: Yo, how are you?
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Can you hear me all right?
Speaker: Uh, yeah.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: I hope you're feeling okay.
Speaker: Maybe it's my cord.
Speaker: I kind of am, but then I feel like maybe it's in my head, but also there's a very good chance I have COVID because my wife has it and we've been separating, but also we live in the same apartment.
Speaker: So it would make sense if I had it.
Speaker: So I was on the train coming towards your place and I was like, you know what?
Speaker: I should go home and we should just do this on Zoom.
Speaker: Just in case.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I'm glad we're still able to actually all converse.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is so funny being on this side with two people on the Zoom because it's usually Alex.
Speaker: I feel like I'm being interviewed, but I'm not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is very strange.
Speaker: I mean, I'm not against it.
Speaker: It's good to change things up.
Speaker: You got to get some other vantage points every now and again.
Speaker: Of all people to do this with, I think Mike... Makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah, because Mike is... I think you're open to a lot of things.
Speaker: Yeah, we can do anything.
Speaker: I mean, this room is, you know... This is just supposed to be the second bedroom, and we've turned it into a gold palace of velvet, you know, so...
Speaker: But by the way, Joe, this is the most acoustically sound room we've done our podcast in so far.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: So it's going to, it'll sound much better than everything else.
Speaker: We will.
Speaker: You will.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I'll sound okay.
Speaker: Oh, do you want me to, should I be recording this from my end?
Speaker: If you want to, yes.
Speaker: I would need permission to record, please.
Speaker: How's that possible?
Speaker: Where do I do that?
Speaker: That's a good question.
Speaker: I don't know if there's a record button, maybe participants.
Speaker: A load.
Speaker: Ah, I'm in.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: If we need to run to the bathroom or anything, that's cool, right?
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: I'm not sure how you edit it or whatnot.
Speaker: We don't edit, but you can still run to the bathroom and we'll banter while you're gone.
Speaker: All right, that's good.
Speaker: Yeah, that's totally fine.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Gives me a reason to watch it again, you know, make sure you didn't say any shit.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: We're like, well, the episode's out.
Speaker: You can find out what we did during those 10 minutes.
Speaker: I have been known to forget to say something and I'll be like, oh, I'll just record that and add it to the thing.
Speaker: But Joe doesn't seem to notice.
Speaker: That's because I don't listen to them very often afterwards.
Speaker: Yeah, one and done.
Speaker: Jessie's like that too.
Speaker: We recorded the episodes and she's never listened to one of them.
Speaker: I like to have them to go back if I'm thinking about a specific walk or a specific thing we did that, you know,
Speaker: The content is there.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, generally it is meant to be like in the moment and then whoever wants to experience it can.
Speaker: Yeah, I get that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I've gone back to a few to like get try and get like sound sound bites or remember what we talked about or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Although I feel like this this like interview format is is very different than.
Speaker: what y'all were doing but yeah um but yeah i mean i've uh i have a checklist actually i can show it to you later uh behind one of these many curtains we have like a like a can banner like a board you know like a to-do done whatever thing
Speaker: And on the list that's like stuff that's processing content for The Walking Project, I want to like write short stories, or not short stories, but essays about it.
Speaker: And that's where I'm kind of anticipating going over the podcast again the most because it's been so long now.
Speaker: You know, I've been focusing on doing the NFT things related to The Walk.
Speaker: that by the time I might ever get to that, if I do, it'll be almost two years.
Speaker: So it's going to be this weird, like, reflecting on the person that I was rather than, like, having an immediate connection to it.
Speaker: Which I don't think there's any wrong answers, but, you know.
Speaker: Two years is like an interesting time because like two years from a thing does feel like a while in whatever the current moment.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But then like once you get 10 years out, those like that chunk of two years can be almost like the same amount of time, right?
Speaker: There's like varying degrees of like past self.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Especially if you like practice reflecting on
Speaker: your whatever experiences a lot then you like have all these opportunities to to like assess who you were and who you are again yeah i mean i uh yeah i didn't there's i've never done a more thorough job of documenting one year of my life than that year
Speaker: So, you know, there's like 20,000 photos, all sorts of video, I journaled every day.
Speaker: I wrote about every bagel that I ate, you know, so like there's definitely content to process in a way that's probably more successful potentially at getting to those truths than if I were to just, you know, live a year and a life and then just try and immediately capture it, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker: I didn't even know we were starting, but I think we are now.
Speaker: Since we're talking about the walking podcast, do you want to give a little synopsis for people who haven't heard it?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So my wife, Jessie Hyatt, and I had and still like quarterly produce a podcast called the Total Clarity Podcast.
Speaker: And the main thrust of that was documentation for this walking project we did called 2020 Total Clarity.
Speaker: And that was from June of 2020 to June of 2021.
Speaker: We walked five marathons a week.
Speaker: for one calendar year around all the neighborhoods in New York City.
Speaker: So 260 marathons, 7,000 miles total.
Speaker: And I guess to be as distinct as possible, I walked the five full marathons.
Speaker: Jessie walked three marathons a week and then worked at her textile studio the other four days a week.
Speaker: So she has a business where she dyes and manufactures garments.
Speaker: And so, so yeah, we kind of our minimum viable product was for one of us to do the marathon five days a week.
Speaker: And that was in the event we got sick or hurt.
Speaker: And fortunately, I never got sick or hurt.
Speaker: So I was able to do the five a week for one year.
Speaker: Sorry, if people listen to the Total Clarity podcast, what can they expect to hear on this kind of like walking podcast?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So it, the first three months or so of the podcast where we were doing the walking, it was a lot of
Speaker: just reflecting on the neighborhoods that we visited, large scale impressions of things, what our bodies were doing, you know, and that was the earlier in the episodes, if that's something that you were interested in, those would be the ones to check out, because it's really like our body going through the shock of walking 132 miles a week.
Speaker: And, you know, what's going wrong, what's generally getting better.
Speaker: You know, it was interesting to watch, like, my body.
Speaker: I feel like there were three six-week chunks.
Speaker: The first six weeks was, like, miserable.
Speaker: My body didn't know what was going on.
Speaker: It didn't want to eat the first couple weeks.
Speaker: Then, like, it was just pain, couldn't sleep at all.
Speaker: And, like, also the feeling of trepidation, like, holy shit, I've committed to this thing.
Speaker: I still have 253 more marathons.
Speaker: And like, I don't know if this pain is going to get worse.
Speaker: Like, it's not, I can handle what's happening right now, but what if it's degenerative, you know?
Speaker: So like, uh, that was the first six weeks.
Speaker: And then the next six weeks was like kind of getting behind the cockpit and like understanding, oh, this button does this.
Speaker: And this, you know, steering thing does this and just kind of getting a handle of the machine.
Speaker: And then after those six weeks, it was like, okay, this is just our lives now.
Speaker: So it took about three months for us to really get settled into the experience.
Speaker: And those three months were just large impressions of the neighborhoods.
Speaker: But then after that, we started doing theme walks.
Speaker: So we'd do like...
Speaker: you know, a Writers of New York walk, or we did, there was a map that was discovered in the New York Public Library that was old Native American roads in Brooklyn.
Speaker: So we walked a marathon along those.
Speaker: And one of a fun one, which is also the most tongue twister to say, was
Speaker: famous female Brooklyn vocalists and the high schools they attended.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So, and that was great.
Speaker: That was actually one of the more popular ones because we did like, we'll do the full episode, right?
Speaker: And then we'll chunk it up for YouTube.
Speaker: So like we'll talk about different high schools that we visited.
Speaker: And so it was about the female vocalists and we had a good time learning about them.
Speaker: But it was also like just interesting to understand the architecture of the high schools and New York City high school history is like
Speaker: fascinating like how it's just changed from like uh like it's gone from like these monolithic institutions that are like meant to like you know uh you know teach tens of thousands of people like in one kind of complex to now they're being like specialty disciplines and you know um i'm sure you've heard the tales about uh you know
Speaker: When people choose high schools around here, it's like, it's a big deal.
Speaker: Might as well be choosing a college, you know?
Speaker: Well, that's what we're not.
Speaker: We're not currently doing what we're doing in the middle school, but the parents that we know that have done the high school route, they say it is, you will be more than prepared for college.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's so intense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's what the impression I get from all the friends that we have that are originally from here.
Speaker: And and yeah, we we ended up interviewing, I'd say, like every other episode we'd interview somebody, you know, that was a local to whatever route we were going on or an expert in whatever we were doing.
Speaker: We did one at the Graveyards of Near Queens, actually just this time of year, you know, in 2020, November of 2020.
Speaker: and we met this guy.
Speaker: His profession was that people would hire him to go to gravestites and take pictures of it to verify their relatives were there and whatnot.
Speaker: He was a very interesting character.
Speaker: He also did an art project that was...
Speaker: It was like a payphone art project where he like, you could call up payphones and he, he would like have, I don't know.
Speaker: I, I'm doing a terrible job explaining it, but basically we would, we'd find, we'd find the weirdest people, the coolest people we could and that were related to the topic we were doing and then interview them as well.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So what was the impetus for that?
Speaker: I mean, I know part of it was COVID.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But how did you arrive at how many marathons you would run?
Speaker: It seems like these durational projects...
Speaker: Joe, you missed it, but the first thing Mike handed to me when I got to his house was a punch card that I could punch time and date as far as labor law requires at Mike Varley's place.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And everyone who's been here has punched a card.
Speaker: Everyone that has been, well, with a couple of weird exceptions when people would refuse to punch the card.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And like, strangely, they're not in our lives anymore.
Speaker: No documentation allowed.
Speaker: No, no documentation, no paper trail.
Speaker: But yeah, it's just a, it's a fun thing that we have here.
Speaker: So we have like, you know, 150 cards taped up onto our kitchen wall with people that, and every time they come, they use their same punch card to punch in and out.
Speaker: But back to my question, no.
Speaker: And again, he's well aware of the artist who did the durational piece of every hour punching.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I mean, I have I have lots of questions related to other artists projects and we'll get to them, I'm sure.
Speaker: But yeah, but the punch card thing is fantastic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But how do you arrive at these particular projects?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I can give you the what actually led up to this walking project and the particulars of why those increments and whatnot.
Speaker: It actually it really wasn't as inspired by COVID as you think.
Speaker: It just the the documentation and the experience was informed by COVID, I'd say.
Speaker: So we, my wife and I, did these vacation walks for three summers in a row.
Speaker: We started with San Diego to Los Angeles.
Speaker: And then the next year we did the length of Vermont up to the border with Canada.
Speaker: And then the third time we did from the Pacific Ocean to Olympia, Washington.
Speaker: And it was during that third trip that I pitched to Jessie this much more expansive five marathon a week for one calendar year around New York City.
Speaker: And of course, she said, no, that's ridiculous.
Speaker: I'm not going to do that.
Speaker: And that was a correct response.
Speaker: She was right to think that.
Speaker: But she found ultimately what her water level was, which that she was able to still maintain her business and the trajectory that she has in her life while participating in this with me.
Speaker: But even the idea of going on a 120-mile vacation walk or a 200-mile vacation walk, it takes a certain type of person, I think.
Speaker: And we love the mental challenge of it.
Speaker: It's a great way to see a space.
Speaker: It's a great way to understand a space.
Speaker: And by the time we had done that third vacation walk, we actually were more...
Speaker: prepared to do this or we like because we understood what it was like to walk 26 miles a day you know um the physical aspect of it people asked if we like trained or anything in before the the new york project and we didn't uh i put my two weeks notice in to my job in february of 2020 and
Speaker: And by the time those two weeks had elapsed, I was packing up my shit.
Speaker: Everybody was packing up their shit.
Speaker: And that studio never reformed.
Speaker: It was a video game company.
Speaker: They never went back to that office.
Speaker: They've since moved into another place in Midtown.
Speaker: And so we were very grimly joking.
Speaker: We didn't realize it was a grim joke at the time, but we joked prior to the pandemic that the only thing that could stop us from starting our project was nuclear attack, land invasion, or
Speaker: a global pandemic and then it actually happened so um we went into three months of hard lockdown just like everybody else and then we started up in june of 2020 it was intended to start up uh the 20th of march you know like this the spring solstice or whatever uh and it turned up to be the start of summer
Speaker: Which ended up working out the best.
Speaker: I mean, we were a little concerned about the heat of summer and it was bad.
Speaker: It was probably the worst season of the four.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it, it was nice to start there because we had longer light and like, we just got it out of the way, the hard one out of the way.
Speaker: Yeah, and you were probably ready to be outside even more after not being able to.
Speaker: But I didn't totally answer your question, which is, you know, like, why those increments?
Speaker: And, you know, when I set out to do things, I like it to have impact and, like, have a narrative hook that people can understand, you know?
Speaker: And even this is very—most people—not most people—
Speaker: There's a good percentage of people that when I tell this to them, it's shocking how non-plus they are about it.
Speaker: And I'm not expecting somebody to be like, oh my goodness, what is... And then ask me a bunch of questions.
Speaker: But just like the sheer look of like...
Speaker: like I hadn't told them anything.
Speaker: Like it's like a really true indicator that people don't listen all the time or something.
Speaker: Cause they're just like, uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh.
Speaker: And so what did you have for breakfast today?
Speaker: Like it's the same level of like, it's weird.
Speaker: It's very strange.
Speaker: It's an immense undertaking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And again, I'm not looking to like be praised every time.
Speaker: Certainly far from that.
Speaker: It's just weird.
Speaker: Like if you're asking me this question about like, you know, what I did during the pandemic or something.
Speaker: That it's, you know, people just have... I guess it's so big, it's like beyond conception.
Speaker: But at the same time, you know, using the markers of like a marathon, that hooks in a bunch of people.
Speaker: And then they're like, either they've done something similar to this, you'd be surprised how many people, you know, they like...
Speaker: they've done cancer walks for like 100 miles over three days or something, or they're marathon runners, or they just, they do hook onto it for some reason.
Speaker: And when I'm doing stuff, I like to try and give as many potential hooks for people to grab onto.
Speaker: So rather than just doing an arbitrary, I walked for four hours a day or something, like giving that marathon time so that people can really imagine, you know, it gives the opportunity for them to imagine.
Speaker: Just, I'm sure you're well aware of the situationists in the 1920s and 30s.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: That was one of the, when we first announced that we were going to do this, that was the first thing that many people gave us to read about.
Speaker: And Will Self, the psychogeographer?
Speaker: That I'm not so familiar with.
Speaker: Or maybe I am, but I've forgotten.
Speaker: I'm psychogeography is as a way to take in especially urban settings.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Through walking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Through the act of walking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How cities were meant for walking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we've kind of like superimposed transportation onto them.
Speaker: Unwalkified them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Unwalkified them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: uh gritified him yeah yeah um but walking is a main point like he would do things like uh he gave a talk at the school i went to and i think he he flew to chicago and he he asked the porter he's like how do i walk to the main part of the city and the guy's like what are you talking about you don't walk yeah yeah you don't walk from o'hare to chicago yeah uh you take a you take a train or you take a
Speaker: Uber or you take a car?
Speaker: But yeah, he's like, no, he walked.
Speaker: It was not, he's like, it's not, it wasn't a great walk.
Speaker: It was very dangerous.
Speaker: He had to walk through embarkments of like on the sides of highways and stuff.
Speaker: There wasn't a direct route to walk, but he did.
Speaker: I mean, even getting off of like LaGuardia here and trying to get to the bus, it's like, you can do it, but it's not like, it's not designed for it at all.
Speaker: And that's in like a city with like some of the best kind of like public transportation pedestrian infrastructure.
Speaker: Yeah, JFK is a nightmare.
Speaker: I mean, you can get pretty close.
Speaker: You could walk to LaGuardia, but JFK, like, we didn't even really crack that, you know?
Speaker: Like, it's just so many.
Speaker: It's the air train and then all the Van Wick and whatever, all the different roads there.
Speaker: It's very difficult.
Speaker: I know I rented a car to go upstate during the pandemic and I didn't want to take the subway because I wasn't feeling comfortable with it.
Speaker: So I rode my bike to JFK and I got to the air train station or whatever.
Speaker: And they're like, you can't like you're not allowed to go past here.
Speaker: I think it's like there's like also it's like under some kind of airspace or like military stuff or something.
Speaker: I don't remember exactly what they said.
Speaker: You have to go like all the way around or you have to take the air train.
Speaker: And so I like held my breath for like 20 minutes on the air train.
Speaker: And it was just like me and all the workers.
Speaker: It was bizarre because it was still, I think it was probably like May or something like that.
Speaker: And like the Hertz rental company was just like a wasteland.
Speaker: It was crazy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just like everything was then.
Speaker: But yeah, you can't, it's tough to get to JFK on bike.
Speaker: The New York's fascinating in terms of its like extreme walkability, but then also certain pockets of unwalkability, by and large, very walkable city.
Speaker: And then also like the grid is like.
Speaker: mind fuck oppressive you know yeah we i we did early on uh we did the midtown like when we were doing by neighborhood the first three months we did uh midtown and it was we we conjured a route that was just like i don't know from like 14th to 59th and just went you know each avenue and then after we did i think
Speaker: We were able to do every avenue and then like the first 10 streets before we hit 26.2.
Speaker: And then we did a podcast that week with our friend Duncan, who is this like psychonaut Wall Street broker, like Burning Man.
Speaker: uh yoga cult dude like it's just all and like he did a freestyle rap about the grid at the end of the podcast but it was like we we really got deep into just what what that experience is you know i it's like when you build a city in like sim city or you know one of those like city building programs it's like oh this is the most efficient way but it's like the reality of it is like very different
Speaker: And I think New York is one of the few places that can get away with it just because the population density allows for it.
Speaker: But otherwise, if you were to plan that and then try and have people move in, it would be a very oppressive situation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's and like if I feel like sometimes I can zoom out on myself when I'm doing stuff like that, like even like just on the commute and like doing that straight route to the train.
Speaker: And like there's only it's like it's like how the how the kind of like architecture of the city changes how your behavior is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just by like by the way you have to walk.
Speaker: When you guys did the Midtown walk, did you find yourself jaywalking on purpose just to go diagonal for a second?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't remember trying to break the vibe of it.
Speaker: It was strange.
Speaker: It also felt good on those days if it was just like, all right, I just need to get through this.
Speaker: Because there were some days where it was, you're recognizing that it's part of this larger project.
Speaker: I don't necessarily want to be doing this right now.
Speaker: So I am just going to move deliberately.
Speaker: So in that respect, it's kind of like you can turn off your brain and just go.
Speaker: You don't have to think about where you're traveling or look at your map to see if you're going the right way or anything.
Speaker: I do want to acknowledge at this point that you're too interesting a person to do this podcast in under an hour.
Speaker: There might have to be a part two.
Speaker: Okay, that's fine.
Speaker: But to go back to the walking, I know it sounds like you've met a lot of very interesting people, which was part of the experience.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Is there anything that sticks out as surprising that kind of like jumped out at you as far as the experience as a whole?
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: I mean, dozens of things probably.
Speaker: I'll just go with whatever comes to mind first.
Speaker: The emergence in my mind of how much New York is a water city was something that makes complete sense, but did not
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: When you think of New York, you think of the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center and the tall buildings in Midtown.
Speaker: And you think of Wall Street.
Speaker: You think of finance.
Speaker: You think of commerce.
Speaker: Obviously, you think of art and things like that, too.
Speaker: But as far as just the profile of the city is the profile of the buildings, right?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: We, when we planned the walks, we did a lot of route mapping around the waterways because we thought it would be, you know, among the most compelling walks that we could do.
Speaker: And not only has New York City done a tremendous job in the past 30 to 40 years of rehabilitating the waterways, making them something that people can use and appreciate and turning it into, you know, blue green space.
Speaker: But I was walking sometime in like January.
Speaker: I think it was one of the days that I was alone of the two a week that I would be alone.
Speaker: And I was going under the Verrazano Bridge or just before.
Speaker: There's a little, there's a road that goes there like in Brooklyn.
Speaker: It's, I forget what it's called.
Speaker: Like Park Trail or Park Road, something like that.
Speaker: And on the one side is the highway.
Speaker: and it's just cars, but there's no building.
Speaker: You can't see buildings past the highway.
Speaker: So in a way, it's almost like white noise, if you can think it that way.
Speaker: If there's buildings around, you can feel that there's life.
Speaker: But when it's just cars going, it just creates this ambient nothingness on one side.
Speaker: And then looking out at the water, you can see Staten Island.
Speaker: And over there, it's far enough away from Staten Island that the buildings over there are indistinguishable.
Speaker: And the effect that was achieved made me feel like Henry Hudson's ship could be like right there.
Speaker: You know, like it it made me recognize like the reason this is the Empire State is because of the Erie Canal, which connects to New York City and like the Great Lakes as a consequence and all the commerce from the middle of the country.
Speaker: And, you know, this is just a chain of islands that's all here.
Speaker: And that was how.
Speaker: Commerce used to exist back then.
Speaker: And I mean, it still does to some degree.
Speaker: There's maritime trade that happens here.
Speaker: You see the huge ships coming in.
Speaker: But it's just not really thought about because we don't live our lives.
Speaker: Most most New Yorkers don't live our lives in that pace, but it's there and it's not going anywhere.
Speaker: And I'm very grateful to have connected with it and to be in this space where like you still have this water connection.
Speaker: That's a great point because I think I came to that realization a while ago as well.
Speaker: It's like port cities, any city, any geographical area that had a natural port that would allow for large ships to come in and out, whether it be Lisbon, whether it be London, whether it be New York City, whether it be Hong Kong.
Speaker: All these cities created, I mean, the infrastructure kind of like built itself because things were coming in and out.
Speaker: Merchants were attracted to it.
Speaker: It's just, it's an emergent thing.
Speaker: It just is a no brainer.
Speaker: It's only now that we have the abilities to have cities where they just need good internet or they just, you know, it's like they could build on different.
Speaker: It doesn't necessarily have to do with like manufacturing and ports.
Speaker: And so it's, and we've had such a,
Speaker: It's such a head start.
Speaker: I mean, you're talking about 500 years of coming and going.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's like, how do you catch up?
Speaker: But we'll see.
Speaker: I mean... But now everybody has the internet, so... The internet will change everything.
Speaker: We'll see.
Speaker: We'll see what happens.
Speaker: That was one of my favorite things about... That I learned living here because...
Speaker: Like I knew there was water in New York City, and I grew up, I grew up in Michigan.
Speaker: And so there was like water was part of our mythology.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so to like learn that I had really easy access to both like, like, just like be able to like walk the waterfront, but also like go to the beach and go swimming.
Speaker: uh in the ocean like i kind of like i knew it existed but i didn't really like when i moved here i thought of everything else that you listed right yeah um so that was like it's been a it's been a fun thing to like have be a part of my life that i didn't know it was going to be which is cool yeah i uh one uh one thing that i still need to do or one thing jesse and i need to do is go to orchard beach uh in pelham bay uh during like a warm season we walked the bronx
Speaker: in April.
Speaker: So it was springtime and we didn't have the opportunity to go there.
Speaker: City Island.
Speaker: I don't know if you've ever been to City Island.
Speaker: It's incredible.
Speaker: It has like 50 different seafood restaurants there.
Speaker: And it's like the Jersey Shore area.
Speaker: but also New York, but also New England, because the terrain up there... So it kind of maintains some boat vibes, like New England boat vibe town.
Speaker: And then Pelham Bay Park, also, it's attached to the mainland.
Speaker: So it has that kind of craggy, rocky, New England-y feel.
Speaker: But there's a beach there, and it is...
Speaker: I don't know, it looks like public works era.
Speaker: I don't know if it is or not, but it looks kind of like that, like these like, you know, pillars and like the shops like built into this kind of infrastructure of, but it's like falling apart at the same time.
Speaker: And I don't know what was going on during the pandemic era, if it was open or not, but like it's this massive complex and it has a beach.
Speaker: It's like a horseshoe shaped beach.
Speaker: And I can only imagine like it's a scene.
Speaker: You know, my experience at the beach is typically like Rockaway, going out there.
Speaker: I've never really gone to Coney Island to go swimming, but obviously that's a vibe too, the Brighton Beach, Coney Island thing.
Speaker: But Rockaway is kind of my go-to, and yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker: I mean, we went there this year for the first time in a couple years, and you just get in the water, and you're like, holy shit.
Speaker: Like, why am I not doing this every week?
Speaker: I grew up in Long Island.
Speaker: Like I, you know, used to go in the Baywater all the time.
Speaker: And obviously that probably informs part of my good feelings about it, but just reconnecting with it and like having that release valve, it's free.
Speaker: And it's, you know, something that anybody in the city can do for 275.
Speaker: They can get on the train, just hang out at the beach all day.
Speaker: And yeah, it's just a...
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I hope that in the next 20 to 30 years moving forward, the powers that be in the municipal side really start featuring the water aspects of the city more and also probably get ahead of whatever is going to be the negative consequence of climate change.
Speaker: I was about to say.
Speaker: It's still there.
Speaker: Yeah, if we can find a way to make retention walls that aren't once again closing these areas off.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I thought it might be good to backtrack a little and explain how we met Mike and why he's on the podcast.
Speaker: But I think I had a question, which is maybe putting you on the spot.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Can't wait.
Speaker: but but i is that possible is it possible we'll find out we'll find out no i mean it's next week yeah that's right that's right i think it's a pretty i think it's a pretty simple question but it's um would you call yourself an artist is that a descriptor you would use that's that's a great question uh and one that i've been really mulling over even in recent weeks
Speaker: I would say the past two years I've been calling myself that and that's the first time I've ever called myself that despite all conventional trapping suggesting that that would be my go to thing.
Speaker: Now I'm
Speaker: like back into the muddle of like, if I am or not again, I, I say artists basically not because I specifically identify, but because it's easier for people to understand what I do if I say that.
Speaker: And so, yeah, just the, the concept of identity is something that's like really been at the forefront of my brain for the past couple of years.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: I don't know, because for me, I've been thinking a lot about this intersection of fine art and service.
Speaker: And a lot of times, the things that I want to make, whatever they are, art or just experience, I don't know, I want to give those hooks that I was talking about earlier.
Speaker: I want to make it evident what I'm doing.
Speaker: I want there to be play on the part of the user, but I also want to have it...
Speaker: come across so that people, some people, everybody can get something out of it.
Speaker: And what I'm struggling with relative to the idea of artist is I see a lot of work that's fine art, which for varying reasons is not striving to be accessible.
Speaker: It's striving to be something that is more challenging.
Speaker: And sometimes, in a pessimistic way, I look at that and I go, well, it's because there's no substance there and they need to be challenging in order to be interesting.
Speaker: And then on the optimistic side of it is that's truly what imagination is.
Speaker: If you create a challenging work, then the user is having to actually have to do hard thought in order to get somewhere.
Speaker: But once they've done that hard thought and they get somewhere,
Speaker: it might be more rewarding than work that has everything laid out for them and invites them to play with it more easily.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: Right now, I would still say I'm an artist.
Speaker: We'll see how much longer that lasts.
Speaker: But I have a background.
Speaker: I've mentioned it off podcast to you guys before where I worked in a nursing home for 13 years.
Speaker: And doing that, I mean, it afforded me a lot of creative time.
Speaker: But more than that, it also got me very intimately in touch with what service means.
Speaker: And like how valuable that is.
Speaker: And so I don't know if that ends up being a mitigating influence on what I'm creating to the point where it's even hard to label it as art.
Speaker: And art is the easiest thing to label anything.
Speaker: Because once you say it's art, that's what it is.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The reason I ask is because there's so many like really...
Speaker: fun and interesting and nice connections between the projects you've done and artists that are kind of in the capital A art canon.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think I can probably speak for Alex and me when I say that, like, we really appreciate both, like, these very kind of challenging artworks that are kind of esoteric and meant for, like, a very specific audience, and then also really appreciate these kind of, like,
Speaker: uh more public facing encompassing projects that have like access points for kind of like quote unquote like regular people or non-art people right right um and like and it doesn't mean that all those things can't exist uh and still all be good or all be whatever i just i think it's an interesting thing in relation to your work because like with just like a little bit of
Speaker: contexts, especially like, and we can talk more about your film work.
Speaker: Yeah, like, but like so much of that, I feel like could be shown like in a gallery.
Speaker: And maybe it was but but with just like a little bit of like a context shift or something like that.
Speaker: And I don't know, did you ever show that work in galleries or was it just film festivals?
Speaker: I'm trying to think.
Speaker: I think it was all film festivals.
Speaker: And if there was a couple of instances where it was shown in a gallery, but kind of in a boisterous setting, you know, it's like, we're going to use this gallery space because we have access to it to show the film, but it's not meant to be like a velvet rope, you know, quiet watching experience, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then it also just reminded me of the huge kind of like social practice emergence in kind of the, I don't know, probably like 2005 on, I think that's kind of like when that kind of like came through.
Speaker: And that was a lot of artists kind of like that I saw going to like get their...
Speaker: MFAs who came from wildly different backgrounds because what they were doing didn't fit into other kind of like fine art categories.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But but they did fit into this like new kind of like emerging category of like kind of like relational work that didn't even look like art.
Speaker: And so that's like especially I mean, a lot of a lot of your stuff, I feel like kind of fits that kind of mold as well.
Speaker: And that's all just like a context thing.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: Does that does that resonate with you, Alex, in terms of Mike's projects?
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, that's a great question that you posed because, I mean, did you, because looking at your background, when you went to school, was that not for art?
Speaker: I graduated with a degree in creative writing.
Speaker: I did so because it was the first year that the major was in existence, and I thought I could be one of 500 English majors, or I could take one more class and be the first creative writing major.
Speaker: So it just kind of took the piss out of all of it.
Speaker: And then, yeah, I double minored in art and art history.
Speaker: But not that that makes... Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But I just saw a lot of those early pieces where there was text involved with visuals and the marriage of the two.
Speaker: And now in talking about these projects, they're, as Joe was saying, more relational aesthetics where it's like a gesture.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: An open-ended gesture that you're kind of like...
Speaker: involving others sort of, but you're doing this thing and then you're kind of opening it up to more nuance as far as the very soft as far as the margin, marginally definition.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's a very interesting thing to see.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I think when you say that, where it makes me jump to is another focal point of my identity is that I like to create communities.
Speaker: I like to get people together and like to create scenarios where a community can be formed and reactions can happen.
Speaker: Ideas are shared.
Speaker: People get excited.
Speaker: It's like, you know, like a...
Speaker: popcorn popping, you know, I like to create those situations.
Speaker: And I, I think, yeah, maybe on some of the earlier work was still, you know, making statements, but not necessarily community oriented.
Speaker: But now, yeah, it seems to maybe be moving more in that direction.
Speaker: And I think about Allen Ginsberg a lot.
Speaker: I find him, you know, like a hero in terms of his creative output and just how he...
Speaker: fostered that that whole group of people you know the he the reason that the beat generation exists is because he believed in all of their work and was submitting them all around the country he couldn't get you know anybody he couldn't get his own writings done but he couldn't get anybody's done and then he just started you know first burrows and then um kerouac and you know just being able to get them all published and elevating everybody that's something that appeals to me you know
Speaker: So his art was his poetry, but it was also the community that he believed in.
Speaker: It's funny because, again, looking through some of your stuff on your website, I loved your About Me.
Speaker: It changed.
Speaker: You have hyperlinks to older About Me's, which I thought was very open.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And just, I mean, just being very honest.
Speaker: I mean, we, I mean, for God's sakes, on a cellular level, we change, we change like every eight years.
Speaker: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But mentally, we're always in a different place and acknowledging it and saying, hey, this is what I used to think about me.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker: Read here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And now this is what I think about me.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: There is, if you look at the evolution, it is more community-based.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And there's also, the string I saw also is...
Speaker: I don't want to say you take issue with capitalism, but you tend to want to refigure or reimagine what capitalism could be.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: If you want to talk a little bit about that.
Speaker: I mean, is there something in particular you're thinking about that I can jump off of?
Speaker: No, it just seemed like... Just the whole system of capitalism.
Speaker: Do I want to go for it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You just want to take it down?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I think it seems like you want people to kind of reimagine the possibilities.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That's what I got.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, I...
Speaker: I would say as far as that topic in general, and I wonder if the last thing that was like, because the website, if you could, mikevarley.com is like, at this point, almost an art piece itself.
Speaker: It's very strange.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if you go to Everything is Everything, that bagel website that I did, which we could potentially get to at some point, that is...
Speaker: uh also what i've been calling contemporary uh web 1.0 which is to say that like it is uh my my mikevarley.com website it's like blog era uh and it doesn't have ads and it doesn't have social you know it's not trying to draw you away it's trying to keep you in that space to experience everything
Speaker: But I, you know, I haven't updated.
Speaker: I have the main feed on the thing that I update maybe once a year.
Speaker: And then we have the about me's that you're there.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: And then, yeah, a lot of like mixed media and movies and things like that.
Speaker: And, you know, with respect to like the capitalism side of things, I.
Speaker: So I don't know if I'm aligned with what the site is there now.
Speaker: What I will say is that I tend to go with whatever the opposing prevailing viewpoint is.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: Probably doesn't.
Speaker: So like I right now, I feel like the zeitgeist is the capitalism is like broken and needs to be totally overthrown.
Speaker: The way that I think about it right now is that it is a salvageable system, but it is like the level of corruption is so intense that I understand why people want to get rid of it.
Speaker: You know, it feels oppressive and it feels like we just need to totally...
Speaker: overthrow this situation.
Speaker: But then if we did, we'd have to start from the bottom.
Speaker: And starting from the bottom is a nightmare.
Speaker: Like you really like you have.
Speaker: OK, so now we're a communist society.
Speaker: I don't know if we were to go that way.
Speaker: Jesus.
Speaker: I mean, there's a lot of terrible precedents.
Speaker: You got to be really dead on right with how you're going to make this one happen.
Speaker: Otherwise, like we already know what could potentially happen.
Speaker: So, I mean, I am inclined to live in a system where we can try and help each other as much as possible.
Speaker: But I recognize that I've made so many things in my life where people just fell off because I wasn't paying them, you know, like, you know, it's so frustrating.
Speaker: You make enough things and at the time you get to the end of every one of them is like, man, I'm never going to I'm never going to do this for free again.
Speaker: I'm never going to do this for limited.
Speaker: I need to be able to pay people if I want to do things at scale.
Speaker: And so that's why the walking project made so much sense because like I don't have to pay.
Speaker: It's just, you know, this is a thing that I'm inviting anybody to engage the degree that they want to engage it.
Speaker: But it's just me and my wife and we saved up a bunch of money and we're going to do this, you know.
Speaker: Correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker: Even on that particular project, you were open about budgets and basically keep us at ease as just staying afloat.
Speaker: If you're even, expenses, incoming income, as long as it's this equilibrium, the momentum is enough to keep going forward.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: Yeah, that was one of the things.
Speaker: If you go to highlyvarlet.com, you can see all the expenses that we had.
Speaker: on the project, you know, broken up by like podcast expense, clothing expense, food expense, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: Shoes?
Speaker: Shoes, yep.
Speaker: Every five weeks, a new pair of shoes.
Speaker: So it was just another little wrinkle.
Speaker: A lot of the stuff that we've done is just the sum of its parts or whatever.
Speaker: Just a little bit of documentation here, a little bit of documentation here, there.
Speaker: The clothing is another thing that we did where it was like.
Speaker: It's nice to see you guys went out to a nice meal once a week or so.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think I actually do have like the the literal line items of like what each thing was on the website.
Speaker: Currently, it's just kind of like what the numbers are.
Speaker: But I really should just add that at the end now that it's all over so that people if they really want to get into that, they could.
Speaker: But yeah, you could see literally, you know, the line items for what each thing is.
Speaker: I think we probably did go out to one or two nice meals while we were walking around, you know.
Speaker: And I assume you were paying $2,000 for rent.
Speaker: That's the fixed costs.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: Yeah, you guys know how much we pay in rent.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: People don't typically tell you that information.
Speaker: I mean, we're very happy with how much we pay around here.
Speaker: I think a lot of people would be around here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Our landlord, when we moved in, she lives in the same building as us.
Speaker: It's a landlord-landlady pair.
Speaker: They live on the basement apartment.
Speaker: We live on the second floor.
Speaker: And when we moved in, they went, we'll never raise the rent on you.
Speaker: Welcome to the family.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And we were like, what is happening?
Speaker: This is not, this is not.
Speaker: The previous landlord I had was this guy that was like,
Speaker: Mike, you're never going to have a better landlord than me.
Speaker: Do you understand?
Speaker: And this is the same guy that was like, you know, Mike, you got to pay me the money.
Speaker: You know, I go to prison, Mike.
Speaker: I'll go to prison.
Speaker: I'll do time.
Speaker: No problem.
Speaker: Where's my money, Mike?
Speaker: Tell me where my money is.
Speaker: It's like, Angelo, it's two days late because my friend is out of town.
Speaker: What do you want me to do?
Speaker: But here's the money.
Speaker: You know, anyway, he was a nightmare.
Speaker: These people are great and they've never raised the rent on us.
Speaker: It's been six years.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: That's a special thing.
Speaker: I don't even know.
Speaker: So Joe, would this be a good place to talk about NFTs?
Speaker: Well, so I was going to say, so since we didn't do it in the beginning of the episode, we met Mike at probably like, I think the most interesting NFT related event that we've been to since we started, that Alex and I have been to since we kind of started
Speaker: working in the crypto space and working with artists and stuff like that.
Speaker: And it was the token.art unconference that happened during, right?
Speaker: This is where we met, right, Mike?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: At Persona Space in Dumbo.
Speaker: Yeah, and it happened during NFT NYC this year.
Speaker: but was kind of like a one off event that was put on by some folks that I don't remember everybody, but people who were connected to art blocks and kind of like there was a lot of generative artists that were there and kind of involved in it.
Speaker: And it was like it was actually like a work.
Speaker: It was like.
Speaker: member led or people who showed up led workshops.
Speaker: So there was no like schedule until people made it.
Speaker: And so people got to like pitch sessions that they wanted to do.
Speaker: And so I ran a curatorial session and Mike was in the kind of like circle up and, and that's kind of like where we first met.
Speaker: And then we've, I don't know, since then have had lots of interesting conversations.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think during that we heard about your bagel project for the first time.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the bagel project is the first of five intended NFT projects that document the walk.
Speaker: So on the walk,
Speaker: Pretty early on, I realized I was going to be hungry.
Speaker: This is so interesting.
Speaker: I didn't realize that the bagel project was part of the walk.
Speaker: I love artists who are efficient.
Speaker: They find things that are interesting to pull out of their everyday experiences or whatever they've turned their everyday experiences into.
Speaker: yeah um which anyway sorry to interrupt keep going no no i'm gonna interrupt too but it's also to the to the again to the sentiment of an artist being open to the to experience and being uh trusting that say given any project something will come out of it yeah totally and you just kind of go forward yeah and if if you do the work there's going to be a reward yeah in some sense yeah
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, that was what the whole walking project was conceptualized as we had a hint of understanding based on doing the summer walks and just based on like taking a step back and assessing.
Speaker: It's like we're going to have an average of nine and a half hours a day where all we're doing is walking.
Speaker: Like that is a picture that you can fill with anything, you know.
Speaker: And so this just happened to be one of the things that
Speaker: that was happening at any given time during those days.
Speaker: So yeah, pretty early on, we were at Utopia Bagels, which is a fantastic bagel store out in like the Whitestone area.
Speaker: And I was eating it.
Speaker: I had actually come off a year prior where I had not eaten a bagel.
Speaker: I just like had just made an indiscriminate choice to not eat a bagel for a year just because I did.
Speaker: Sounds like you're kind of into indiscriminate choices.
Speaker: Yes, I am.
Speaker: But what I have a year long.
Speaker: I discriminate in my indiscriminate choices, though, somehow.
Speaker: I can't wait to read the book.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So I I was having this bagel and I was like, wow, this is a good bagel.
Speaker: And I started thinking, again, it's going to be in every neighborhood in New York City.
Speaker: I was going to need to eat.
Speaker: I was going to want to eat affordably.
Speaker: And I was not going to want to have to sit down and have a whole meal.
Speaker: Bagels are perfect for all of those things.
Speaker: So what I ended up doing was eating at three different stores a week for the entire duration of the project.
Speaker: So it ended up in the neighborhood of 150.
Speaker: And then from there, I put those stores on a Google map and I realized that the coverage was lacking.
Speaker: I couldn't go to war on such an important topic without having a more denser representation of the neighborhoods.
Speaker: So then I ate another 50 plus bagels in the month of September 2021, which was awful.
Speaker: Don't do that.
Speaker: It's it was worse than walking marathons.
Speaker: to be honest.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would be eating six bagels a day sometimes.
Speaker: And my, uh, my thought was like, okay, well you have to eat at least half of it at a minimum, but I would get through half of the bagel and I would felt like I didn't have enough information to review the bagel fairly.
Speaker: So then I would eat the full thing anyway, even though I wasn't like particularly hungry.
Speaker: Uh, and then, yeah, I would write a review on them.
Speaker: There's three, there's a three point review system.
Speaker: It was the, uh,
Speaker: the bagel, the cream cheese, and the store, zero to five scale for each.
Speaker: And then, yeah, it ended up being 220.
Speaker: Well, right now it's, it's, it launched, the website launched with 202 stores.
Speaker: It's now somewhere at like 216 and counting.
Speaker: I keep it updated with some regularity.
Speaker: And then every month or so, maybe I'll go to a new store.
Speaker: I'm not trying to keep up the same pace.
Speaker: It was never an intention to do all the stores in the city because by the time you get to the last store, a bunch would be closed, new ones would open.
Speaker: It was about the experience of the year.
Speaker: But there are fans of certain stores and I want to honor that.
Speaker: So I have an ongoing list as people contact me.
Speaker: And yeah, each one of those bagels I took a picture of and I turned it into an NFT.
Speaker: And I had like all the metadata of like the scores as well as like the awards.
Speaker: That's all on chain.
Speaker: So I don't know if anybody's ever going to do something with that data, but it is available if somebody wanted to use the number data.
Speaker: And then the photos are stored off chain on IPFS.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Briefly, can you tell the audience about the type of bagel you chose and the cream cheese?
Speaker: Yeah, it was always an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese.
Speaker: And the premise behind that was that it gave the stores an opportunity to show a little bit of creativity in what they're doing.
Speaker: So, you know, is it one-sided or two-sided?
Speaker: What's the density of toppings?
Speaker: More likely than not, you're going to have the standard sesame, garlic, poppy, onion, and then
Speaker: Salt, you know, is it going to be the grains or is it going to be kind of more like baked in?
Speaker: And then in addition to that, like, are we going to have oat?
Speaker: We're going to have flaxseed.
Speaker: You know, what are the additional toppings?
Speaker: If there were things that were nonstandard, those were also listed as part of the metadata in the NFTs.
Speaker: And then the scallion cream cheese, you know, how thick is the chunk of scallion?
Speaker: Is it going to be like a racer size meant to add texture or is it kind of a finer blend meant to add flavoring and coloring?
Speaker: And yeah, I mean, you would be able to distinguish between the good stores and the bad stores by how much they'd be phoning those types of things in.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Also, like, it's one of the more popular orders.
Speaker: So, you know, if I got like a, I don't know, blueberry bagel with like walnut cream cheese or something, you know,
Speaker: that's a cool bagel but it's not a good baseline it's not yeah no it doesn't give you like the kind of you know it's the the whole thing is the the marriage of absurdity and like uh scientific process right you know right like the idea of like i'm gonna create a control for this situation and uh it's resonated with people i mean it's it has been the most successful thing i've ever done from a like uh
Speaker: publicity standpoint you know i at this point since its launch i would say like 20 plus people i'll be having a conversation with them and it'll come up and they'll be like oh you're that guy which is bizarre i've never had that happen in my life so um and it you know it was validating insofar as it it i aim for something that was intentionally middle brow and
Speaker: And like it worked like I led as far as documenting the walk, I led with this thing because I knew that I mentioned earlier, people hear Marathon, their eyes glaze over.
Speaker: Either they can't relate to because they've never done it or they weirdly don't want to relate to it at all.
Speaker: But bagels, people love people love bagels.
Speaker: In New York City, they love to fight about it.
Speaker: It's like politics without any consequence.
Speaker: Like you can fight about Essa bagel.
Speaker: No, H&H bagel.
Speaker: No, Liberty bagel.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, I'd just be like, ah, whatever, your taste sucks.
Speaker: Anyway, let's go.
Speaker: You know, like, it doesn't matter, but it's fun.
Speaker: It's just like the weather, you know, or it's something.
Speaker: It's just like a New York offhand thing.
Speaker: I've got to say, you've, since talking to you about bagels, you've converted me, and that is now my go-to order.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: I also want to confess that when we first met, I think Joe had mentioned that I had put peanut butter on bagels.
Speaker: On a plane.
Speaker: A plane bagel with peanut butter.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I do remember that.
Speaker: I do have to explain the choice.
Speaker: At the time... It's a very difficult time.
Speaker: It's a very difficult time.
Speaker: It was.
Speaker: My lactose intolerance.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: So, yes.
Speaker: I still don't think it's an excuse, but...
Speaker: There's some good vegan cream cheeses that could introduce you to it, which is surprising.
Speaker: At that time, I had some really bad vegan chalky cream cheeses that kind of threw me off.
Speaker: And I'm like, oh, you know what?
Speaker: Protein, peanut butter, bagel.
Speaker: I like the chewiness, but now I've been converted.
Speaker: I think I've been saved.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: I'm glad to hear it.
Speaker: The big secret about bagels that some people get upset at me when I say is that like you should not be eating three bagels a week.
Speaker: Like, you know, some people and some people eat them every day.
Speaker: But like that is not good for you.
Speaker: Like, I don't care if you scoop it out or not.
Speaker: It's just like you.
Speaker: A lot of carbs, a lot of dairy.
Speaker: Yeah, it should be.
Speaker: There's a lot going on there.
Speaker: It should be something that is a treat or like I'm going to go for a hike and I need a bagel or something.
Speaker: Like I really like I said, I mean, obviously, 50 bagels is excessive, too.
Speaker: But, you know, the only reason that I undertook this thing is because I was walking five marathons a week.
Speaker: You know, right now I like I love bagels and I like going out for bagels with people.
Speaker: But, yeah, to do it all the time is, you know.
Speaker: Not great.
Speaker: Well, to do that to people where you put these pros on the Internet and make these bagels sound so delicious.
Speaker: How can you tell them not to eat the three bagels?
Speaker: I think they should go and enjoy them.
Speaker: You know, it's like, you know, like cookie monsters, like cookies are sometimes food.
Speaker: Remember when they did that?
Speaker: Like sometimes sometime in the 2010s, they were like cookie monster, slow your roll.
Speaker: So you're the cookie monster of the bagel world.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: For instance, I'd like to read a snippet from one of your reviews of Hot Bagels in Middle Village, right close to me.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It says, a flavor funk in the best way, unsparingly messy.
Speaker: As I eat, I realize the goal of a bagel is to get one where the messiness is eclipsed by the deliciousness, a loss of ego to the act of eating.
Speaker: It is a barbecue experience for the morning hours.
Speaker: I want to eat a bagel right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you're reading from the number one store in the whole project, and that was one of the reasons why.
Speaker: That was the only five bagel out of all.
Speaker: I'm a hard judger, but I also don't go below two typically, unless it's a real nightmare.
Speaker: But yeah, there was only one straight bagel that got a five, and it was that one, and that was...
Speaker: a good reason why, because it made me recognize this fundamental truth about bagels, that they're the barbecue of breakfast.
Speaker: The best versions are when the cream cheese has been activated by the heat of the bagel.
Speaker: And that's one of the reasons why a lot of people like to toast their bagel, right?
Speaker: Because it's the shortcut to get to that experience.
Speaker: But if you toast your bagel, what you're doing is you're raising the floor of the bagel and you're lowering the ceiling.
Speaker: So you can, it, it makes a crunchiness and it activates the ingredients and it activates the cream cheese.
Speaker: Like it can turn the onion smoky and whatnot.
Speaker: But the thing is that like a bagel that's fresh out of the oven already has all of those ingredients.
Speaker: characteristics that a toasted bagel has, but you're not turning it into a piece of toast.
Speaker: Like there are all sorts of flavors at the top end there.
Speaker: So if you can get a bagel that's out of the oven that activates the cream cheese to make it sloppy, and you're basically like doing this delicate dance with your hand, like turning it, using your wrist to like fold the cream cheese on top of the bagel as you're eating it.
Speaker: And you're like, this is a nightmare, but it's so good.
Speaker: That is really the experience that you want.
Speaker: out of a bagel as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker: Beautifully said.
Speaker: I could see why you were, were you not the mayor at that?
Speaker: I, uh, we just did bagel fest a few weeks ago.
Speaker: There is a bagel community in New York city.
Speaker: Uh, I guess don't be surprised.
Speaker: Uh, but this, all the shopkeepers are amazing.
Speaker: And like the people that are, uh, fans are real fans.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I was one of the expert judges and they gave me a sash.
Speaker: Uh, I can show it to you later.
Speaker: Uh, it's a picture of you with this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It says bagel expert on it.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: And, yeah, and that was a great experience.
Speaker: I gave a talk about the walking project, but also just like the fundamentals of the bagel project itself, the sub project that goes over the website and rankings and whatnot, and also just the impetus for making this an NFT project, you know.
Speaker: And you said this is one of five projects.
Speaker: I saw the other one where the weed.
Speaker: Yeah, weed bags are actually there's a that right over there, that bag.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: There's a bag of a giant punch bowl of over 200 weed bags just off camera.
Speaker: And that was so while we were walking around again, the most compelling trash that we found on the street were weed bags.
Speaker: So there's kind of like Mylar bags that have, you know, like the Simpsons or Dragon Ball Z, Rick and Morty, all knockoffs, you know, obviously they didn't get the licensing rights for them, which I think is fascinating.
Speaker: That they like respect copyright.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So like 40 percent of them are all these copyright infringements.
Speaker: Like Bart Simpson in a smoking jacket, lighting a blunt with a dollar bill, you know, like that type of stuff.
Speaker: That was the first one.
Speaker: I sent a picture to somebody, a friend of mine.
Speaker: And he was like, dude, did you pick that up for me?
Speaker: And I was like, what do you mean?
Speaker: Of course I didn't pick that up for you.
Speaker: And then like 10 minutes later, I was like, shit, I should have picked that up.
Speaker: And then I went back the next day and it was gone.
Speaker: I was pissed.
Speaker: But then it was like, all right, well, I need to start collecting these.
Speaker: I ultimately did find another version of that again.
Speaker: So yeah, thank God.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So they're not all copyright infringement.
Speaker: There's also like a lot of bags that are from dispensaries around the country that have their own branding that they're trying to promote.
Speaker: So, I mean, I find it fascinating what these are.
Speaker: And it became doubly fascinating when in March of 2021, weed was legalized in the city.
Speaker: So it stands to reason that these particular artifacts are going to change fundamentally in the 10, 15, 20 years from now, particularly as everything becomes legal, these shops and dispensaries, they're not going to
Speaker: They're not going to mess with IP infringement.
Speaker: They can create their own thing that they can brand and actually sell.
Speaker: You know, I understand why it's happening now because the legality was vague for a really long time.
Speaker: So why not do something that's equally illegal, you know, brand it with something that's interesting.
Speaker: So we collected all these bags, again, about 220, and then we went back after the walking project was over to different famous and ubiquitous ground textures in New York City.
Speaker: So, for instance, we go to the Coney Island Boardwalk.
Speaker: I took 10 bags, I took 10 pictures.
Speaker: We went to the John Lennon Imagine Mosaic in Central Park, took three bags, three pictures there.
Speaker: I bought a ticket to a front row at a college basketball game at the Garden, St.
Speaker: John's, because it's cheap to college basketball.
Speaker: And then I convinced the security to let me on the court so I could take one picture of one bag.
Speaker: And then Jesse took a picture of me taking the picture.
Speaker: So it wasn't some like, you know, St.
Speaker: Francis Xavier High School somewhere like it actually was the Garden.
Speaker: And it's just a bunch of guys in masks like swarming me because now they're seeing what I'm doing.
Speaker: They're pretty chill with it.
Speaker: But like after I took like five or six photos and then I like picked up the bag and hesitated and was going to put it back down again and take some more.
Speaker: The guy was like, no, you're done, dude.
Speaker: You're done.
Speaker: but we got it.
Speaker: We got it.
Speaker: So that that's a one of one weed bag NFT.
Speaker: You know that one of the, I mean, one of the 8,000 things that I love about the NFT medium is the, the degree of like creating a sense of rarity through the data set that like the artist can make the idea of this thing is more valuable than this other thing through essentially the equivalent of like iTunes, you know, like, you know,
Speaker: sorting genre, like album, artists.
Speaker: Like you can apply these different like data points to an image and then create a universe of subjective value.
Speaker: Was there any correlation between best bagels and worst bagels and NFT prices?
Speaker: I'm like, I don't know if the secondary market happened very, very much, but like, was there any kind of like connection there?
Speaker: There was in the way that people were posting them.
Speaker: So there's 202 bagels.
Speaker: They're still on sale.
Speaker: Somebody bought one three days ago, I think.
Speaker: We got 153 out of 202.
Speaker: The number one bagel store is still out in the pool because it's a random mint.
Speaker: So for people that are interested in that.
Speaker: And what's more, the number one bagel store is closing.
Speaker: Actually has closed.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a long story.
Speaker: Unfortunately, they got squeezed out by their landlord.
Speaker: and they couldn't figure it out.
Speaker: I've been trying to help them and we'll try to continue to help them like post, you know, bagel life, but like that no longer exists now.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So it is like a time capsule.
Speaker: And that'll, you know, as this project ages, it will continue to be that sort of thing.
Speaker: And I need to find a way to start documenting the fact that they're closed so people aren't going there expecting one thing.
Speaker: But yeah, so it's, that's now moved into history.
Speaker: But it remains out in the pool.
Speaker: And yeah, I think as far as like secondary market pricing, yeah, the best bagels or bagels of note.
Speaker: There was awards given to the bagel cream cheese or stores of note, 15 each of those.
Speaker: And they tend to command a higher value.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: And maybe the worst one, too.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's, yeah, there's worst store, there's worst store.
Speaker: bagel and worst cream cheese.
Speaker: I think the worst bagel, I think it's like called Woodhaven bagels.
Speaker: It just had a terrible, I mean, it was a bad bagel, but it also was just like the store flow was a nightmare.
Speaker: I waited there for 15 minutes.
Speaker: It was unclear where to order.
Speaker: There was like a drink
Speaker: case in front of the deli case it was like breaking up things in this awful feng shui manner like i'm using feng shui very loosely like it just it felt it felt uncomfortable to be in there the staff didn't know what was going on and like i was i after 15 minutes i was just leaving and the guy was like wait wait what do you want it's like what what the hell is going on here oh and then as soon as i ordered they like got it to me relatively soon but it it
Speaker: It was a shitty bagel and a shitty experience.
Speaker: And it's the worst bagel.
Speaker: I just, I'm having a fantasy of talking to that owner and saying, it was great.
Speaker: I made him wait.
Speaker: He was almost out the door.
Speaker: And then as soon as I was like, yeah.
Speaker: And then I marked it off.
Speaker: And that's customer number 202.
Speaker: I gave the worst experience to him.
Speaker: And the security footage is the NFT.
Speaker: And he's got NFCs of all his customers.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I was the worst customer for sure.
Speaker: By far.
Speaker: So you said this was the second one.
Speaker: So do you have in mind the third, fourth, and fifth?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The Weedbag one's not online yet, right?
Speaker: Or is it?
Speaker: No, Weedbags.myc.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So everything that I've done, too, because, again, I like to provide access.
Speaker: None of this requires NFT.
Speaker: You don't need to be a Web3 person to appreciate any of this.
Speaker: I mean, the site itself is up.
Speaker: People still use it for the bagels routinely to find the best bagel in their immediate area because there's a map and whatnot.
Speaker: The...
Speaker: The weed bags one, my wife, Jessie, drew this character that's kind of like a male Carmen Sandiego.
Speaker: So he's got like a green.
Speaker: I'm looking at him right now.
Speaker: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you go to the site and you click his jacket and he opens it up.
Speaker: Uh, it's kind of like flasher vibe, but also like, I'll sell you these watches type thing.
Speaker: And, uh, you can browse all of the bags and like, you know, again, provided like a type and subtype for each bags with dispensary, uh, they might, uh, come from what size the bags are, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: If they have holograms on them, things like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then, yeah, so there'll be three more.
Speaker: Like you said, the next one coming up.
Speaker: I guess at this point I've been trying to keep it under the hat.
Speaker: No, but it's close enough now that I think it's worthwhile talking about.
Speaker: Love exclusive content.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: It's Lost Pets of New York.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: So what...
Speaker: We did again as we were walking around.
Speaker: We took photos of every lost dog, lost cat, lost bird, lost ferret sign that we saw.
Speaker: And what we're going to do there is take the image of just the animal itself, not like the whole description, and reduce it in size such that it is a pixel art image.
Speaker: that can be stored on the blockchain, so like within the NFT itself.
Speaker: And for those that don't know the intricacies of NFTs, the very, very, very Cliff Notes version of this is pictures over a certain size in like megabytes are too big to be stored within the Ethereum blockchain.
Speaker: So they need to be stored on like a hosting service.
Speaker: And I mentioned IPFS, Interplanetary File Service.
Speaker: That is a popular place to store the actual NFT assets.
Speaker: But the idea is that there is an extra layer of dependency there, right?
Speaker: Like if IPFS were to disappear or go down, I have no anticipation that it will.
Speaker: But if it would, then the NFT would need to redirect to another place so that you would have the image.
Speaker: Otherwise, you just have a receipt of ownership of that particular thing.
Speaker: with images that are of a certain size smaller, and by using pixel art that it could be like only a couple of kilobytes, it can be stored on the blockchain itself.
Speaker: So anything that you would ever need to reproduce the image is there.
Speaker: So, so long as Ethereum exists, the image will be reproducible.
Speaker: And if Ethereum didn't exist, it's at a level of scale now where like we would be dealing with much bigger problems in our lives.
Speaker: You know, it's like,
Speaker: the idea of like my dog's leg is falling off from radiation and peanut butter is extinct.
Speaker: Like it'd be that level of problems that we'd be dealing with.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: So you're saying peanut butter is important.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I guess so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's probably still priority like 3,692 on apocalyptic events.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: So the fact that they're of that size, I think it plays well for me rather than like just having this, you know, extra, having the large images as the NFTs, which I'll put together a website where you can see the full image.
Speaker: Cause that's, I think that's fascinating too.
Speaker: Like the, um,
Speaker: architecture behind what people think a lost animal sign should look like is fascinating.
Speaker: So there'll be all that.
Speaker: But then I just like the idea of kind of giving this aura of permanence to a lost animal.
Speaker: It's like a shrine situation.
Speaker: And obviously, I mean, it should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway like this.
Speaker: I do not intend to collect any money from this project.
Speaker: I just don't think I have the...
Speaker: mental fortitude, testicular fortitude, whatever, to collect money off of somebody's lost animals.
Speaker: Like, that's awful.
Speaker: So I think either it's going to be a free mint or I'll hook up with an organization to do a donation based.
Speaker: It'll really kind of see like what the market is vibing at that point, you know?
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, these are the things that I am excited about in the NFT space, like different experiments with like, what is the future of reviews?
Speaker: You know, how can NFTs potentially be the future of reviews to overtake a Yelp or a Google?
Speaker: And with this, like playing with the idea of being able to create a permanent thing like it, it almost feels like I was daydreaming about it yesterday.
Speaker: It's like these are cave paintings, you know, and like I have no again, I have no expectation.
Speaker: Theorem is going to go anywhere anytime soon.
Speaker: Like in a thousand years, these things could still be there.
Speaker: And like the people will be messing around, poking around like, what is this weird quasi dog?
Speaker: It's a dog, right?
Speaker: I think it's a dog, because it's all pixel art.
Speaker: It's like, I think that's what that is, you know?
Speaker: Just being able to play with these frontiers, just like undriven snow.
Speaker: And for a guy like me, obviously I sound like a true dilettante.
Speaker: I've been jumping around to everything.
Speaker: But like, just this NFT, NFTs are great because it can contain music.
Speaker: It can contain movies.
Speaker: It can contain mixed media art.
Speaker: It can contain writing.
Speaker: I can actually start building an oeuvre for the first time in my life, even though I'm not like,
Speaker: comfortable calling myself an artist.
Speaker: They'll at least like, if you're an NFT collector, if I continue to create in this space, that will make sense to you versus like, you know, having you to have to come over to my house to give you a DVD and hopefully you have a DVD player, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, there is a thread, though, about observing these things that go unnoticed, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: Like, whether it be bagels, whether it be these bags of weed.
Speaker: I mean, lost and found posters, I think we've talked about before.
Speaker: I'm a big connoisseur as well.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It is amazing.
Speaker: I especially love the poster that tells you that the pet is, don't make eye contact.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Don't touch the pet.
Speaker: Don't call its name.
Speaker: If you see it, follow it.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Call me and follow it, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah, the ones that are like, we'll definitely run away.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: It's gone.
Speaker: But then using the NFT as this container to contain all these...
Speaker: disparate things yeah like fall uh into your observations i mean i just love the way it kind of flows thank you yeah yeah i was trying to like find a through thread too to some of your earlier work and the and the film film work that you sent to and i feel like um like a you're like a collector of of things and experiences and information and so like at least with some of those film works
Speaker: uh you know like they're very curated collections of things that are kind of like put together um because i see i i like felt like i was trying to find like a through thread through all these things and i don't know exactly what it is but that was like the one that i kept going back to was that you you seem to be interested in all of the things that you said but then also like um
Speaker: collecting these different things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: I think being able to take experience and position it in such a manner that it reveals something, you know, is what I like to do.
Speaker: I like to assemble situations.
Speaker: And, you know, I'm not necessarily, I'm not, I wouldn't consider myself a craftsman in any particular thing.
Speaker: I am more about recreating the enthusiasm of an experience than I am about replicating an experience again and again and again in order to burnish it to a certain thing.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I mean, with the past couple of movies that we've done with Global Staycation, where I took a bunch of 80s VHS footage and paired it with some music that I made,
Speaker: That is, yeah, that is just an accumulation of different instances of, I guess, nostalgia, but also just, yeah, just like putting together some dominant theme, making people recognize themes that emerge, you know, like, yeah, I guess the having dynamic emergence of theme become apparent to a user.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you're like diving, you're like diving into that archive in that work.
Speaker: And then in this new, new work you're making, you're like creating archives, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, I think you're, you're making me realize it in real time, which is always a nice thing is that's what all of the NFT things have been so far is, you know, taking this vast swath of experience and curating some sort of pattern that I,
Speaker: eyewitnessed or that I want to draw out of it, you know, because sometimes they're evident, but other times you have to work a little harder.
Speaker: And ultimately, I think that's that's part of what art does for me is to extrapolate, extrapolate that pattern making.
Speaker: I think we're getting close to the
Speaker: Wrapping up, but I was just going to, I thought that was like a really nice final kind of closing.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: No, I was just saying, because you're saying extrapolate, but just, can you tie that into then your voxel space?
Speaker: Yes, of course.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Inverts it out, right?
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: So I also have several parcels in the Voxels metaverse space.
Speaker: It is, you know, virtual real estate.
Speaker: Voxels I happen to enjoy because it is accessible to any device.
Speaker: You don't need an account.
Speaker: So you could use your cell phone, you can use a laptop, you can use a tablet, whatever.
Speaker: And it also has this aesthetic that's like very manic, reminds me of MySpace in a favorable way, where it's like each parcel is very different than the other.
Speaker: And as befits the voxel name, it has voxel blocks as like kind of the base building structure, kind of like a...
Speaker: Minecraft-esque aesthetic, which I'd never played before.
Speaker: But to be able to build in this space, they have very robust building tools.
Speaker: And unlike a lot of the metaverses that exist out there, the parcels, you can walk from one to another to another.
Speaker: A lot of the other metaverse spaces are instanced.
Speaker: So it's like an island and you teleport from one island to the other.
Speaker: So they have a first mover advantage.
Speaker: Whether or not they'll be able to capitalize on that fact that they have this infrastructure set up or not remains to be seen.
Speaker: It'll be two to three years.
Speaker: It'll play out because I do think that these virtual real estate platforms will generally establish a foothold eventually.
Speaker: Do you like your neighbors?
Speaker: I do very much.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Wait, so I have one.
Speaker: His name is Jack.
Speaker: He lives in Bangkok, but he's originally from, like, Maryland.
Speaker: And so we got to meet last spring.
Speaker: He came back for, like, six weeks or so.
Speaker: And, yeah, we do regular.
Speaker: We use his venue for concerts, basically.
Speaker: And we use my venue for gallery openings and whatnot.
Speaker: So I have a gallery that's set up right now just kind of like as a placeholder for all the bagel stuff.
Speaker: So you can browse that.
Speaker: And then I have one space that is I call it HV Laboratory.
Speaker: And that's where artists that are more traditional artists that want to get into Web3 for the first time, give them the space as a residency for like two or three months at a time.
Speaker: So in fact, we're having, I don't know when this comes out, but November 15th, we are having a show opening for an artist that does, she did, her name's Joanna.
Speaker: She did a series called Wish Fulfillment.
Speaker: And it was like oil paintings.
Speaker: In real life, there was an opening.
Speaker: And if you went to this opening, you'd see that they were all these wishing wells.
Speaker: And wishing wells and fountains often have like coins in them.
Speaker: So she took pictures of all the coins that were in these fountain paintings and turned the coins themselves into NFTs.
Speaker: So if you were there at the opening, you could claim an NFT coin version of the painting.
Speaker: And we're going to do another virtual opening on November 15th and have an IRL thing as well.
Speaker: And anybody that shows up to the IRL thing or the virtual thing can claim one of her coin NFTs.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: So, yeah, she did a great job building out the space.
Speaker: It's interesting to see like the learning curves people have with like creating voxel models.
Speaker: But like, you know, people do amazing stuff when you just give them the opportunity to play around.
Speaker: So, yeah, I and then I have another space as well that's just more like general.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: event things.
Speaker: We had a pair of artists that are Web3 native that did like oil painting collaborations.
Speaker: They worked on the same canvas over eight days.
Speaker: They did eight pieces and then they sold those as NFTs.
Speaker: And if you bought the NFT, you got it, the physical version as well.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, I love the experimentation that's going on in that space, discerning the difference between what a real life event is, what a virtual event is, what works, what doesn't.
Speaker: And there are definitely some things that are emergent and novel.
Speaker: And there are other things that just are never going to translate.
Speaker: And and that doesn't you know, that doesn't mean it's a failure.
Speaker: It just means it's a different medium, you know.
Speaker: Well, that's great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We definitely appreciate the crossover between the physical and the digital and, and all of this stuff going on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I love coming to check out your show a few weeks back.
Speaker: That was great.
Speaker: I mean, the idea of like having a real life setting and then putting on a VR headset and having that same setting.
Speaker: And it's like the physical uncanny valley of like, this is over there, but my head's over here.
Speaker: How is this happening?
Speaker: Oh, the VR world is becoming more real than the real world right now.
Speaker: Like I'd never experienced that.
Speaker: And honestly, I don't know.
Speaker: I, you know, that's a very particular type of setup.
Speaker: You know, you could have a gallery show with VR headsets, but they're probably not going to recreate that room.
Speaker: Yeah, it was great.
Speaker: So that was a fun one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, thanks, Mike.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Thanks again for inviting us to your home and telling us these amazing stories.
Speaker: Can't wait to see.
Speaker: Can I get a digital punch card or something since I zoomed in?
Speaker: Or what's the rules around that?
Speaker: You can't punch in, but I can give you the one.
Speaker: I have actually notes on the back of the one that was supposed to go to you.
Speaker: So I'll give you this one.
Speaker: Along with the dad candy I was going to give you from my daughter's.
Speaker: Oh, the one with the rejects or whatever?
Speaker: Is it like Baby Ruth or something?
Speaker: It's like Polish Ruth.
Speaker: Oh, sure.
Speaker: She was in Greenpoint.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: But thank you, Mike.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker: Anytime.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: And I'm sure we will have you again.
Speaker: But I can't wait to share some of the pictures of you and your stash.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I shaved my face for Halloween because I had a mask that didn't appreciate the mustache.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Oh, Sash.
Speaker: I thought you said Stash.
Speaker: Oh, I thought you said Stash.
Speaker: Sash and Stash.
Speaker: Both.
Speaker: Both.
Speaker: Both.
Speaker: My Stash-less Sash.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Good to see you.
Speaker: Cheers.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Arranging Tangerines is recorded, edited, and produced by Lydian Stater, an evolving curatorial platform based in New York City with a focus on the intersection of contemporary and crypto art.
Speaker: You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at Lydian Stater NYC on Instagram, and follow us at Lydian Stater on Twitter.
Speaker: Thanks to Mike for taking the time to speak to us this week.
Speaker: If you'd like to learn more about his projects, visit him on Twitter at Hailey Barlett.
Speaker: Big thanks to Tal Juan, who graciously provides our intro music.
Speaker: His albums are available at talwan.bandcamp.com.
Speaker: And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I just know.
