(Image from Tekkon Kinkreet by Taiyo Matsumoto)
This is The Praxis Circus.
Apologies for the later than normal newsletter, but I woke up this morning and ended up hanging out with Anna and Bibi watching Netflix’s Lost in Space reboot 🙇🏾♂️.
Earlier this week I got sent an article on Dazed Digital that was part of a series of “Nigeria day” articles. It got me really frustrated initially and I had a bit of a rant about it and the rest of the articles with a few long suffering friends. Having calmed down now, I can say that my main issue with things like this has nothing to do with their quality, but the perspective that I feel is being pushed aggressively as the view from Nigeria. Like afrofuturism, these aesthetics feel fundamentally to me like they are from an alien perspective; an exoticisation of what Nigeria/Africa is from the perspective of a group of people that have so much of a reason to deny the present reality and reimagine both the past, present and future. I am not on here to say that this view is not valid, but that it is a) not the ONLY viewpoint and b) honestly doesn’t speak for the experience of colonialism, intertribal and ethnic group warfare and current golabilsation-powered economic oppression that describes the current Africa.
Anyway, I think this just means that more of us need to create other narratives and propagate them as well in order to provide more than just one perspective on what it means to be African and black.
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Venkatesh Rao went in deep on this amazing essay where he talks about making rules for life.
He built this interesting framework based on transitions between states of life (home, frontier and public) and used it as scaffolding to construct a guide for mapping out the rumination of your subconscious and your conscious mind.
I recommend you go through it a number of times and have a pen/pencil and paper to hand so you can take notes and sketches as you go through. He tends to write a lot of this sort of “meaning of life” article and dresses them up in esoteric language and flippant meme-filled asides which simulataneously makes them easy to get into and obtuse, but they are almost always worth your time.
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Food and diet are very important parts of “living a good life” and their importance to me personally has increased in recent times. I saw two articles recently that I think are great to share. The first one is seriously good and I think the name of the article does it justice. Extremely comprehensive, it is really the last article you will probably need to read about nutrition and diet. Having just typed that, here’s another one talking about food that is good for brain function.
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I have mentioned Jordan Greenhall before and this podcast conversation with him (one of two) centers on collective intelligence. The second one is even more interesting in my opinion (and if you had to choose only one for some weird reason, I recommend it) and outlines very clearly a concept I have been circling around for a while now without knowing it. His concept of sovereignty is an idea that deserves to see more circulation AND adoption.
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I am a Wes Anderson fan and I was very worried once I heard what his latest film Isle of Dogs was about. I am not surprised it turned out to be the sort of production that could generate this kind of critique, but I am disappointed.
On some level I actually believe it is a lot to expect “Western” creators to be able to see their own prejudices and how much damage they inadvertently cause with any form of consistency or real insight (this comes with the territory when one thinks about how the human mind works), but we need to keep having these conversations - from a place of sovereignty - in order to educate people better and ensure that even when they happen, everyone can understand that there is a larger context in which these sorts of depictions figure into.
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Thanks to Lyall Sprong for putting me on to this - Industry of all Nations. A great design studio and store rethinking how consumer goods are produced. I am revisiting the idea of building a “consumer goods” company and transmuting Stranger into a test-run for this and seeing more companies making this model work is always encouraging. It also helps that their stuff looks super cool 😎.
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Finally, I am still digesting this article on Medium about the Beyoncé/Jay-Z phenomenon. What really caught my eye though was a tangent on what it means to be rich and part of a minority group and how there is almost an inherent responsibility to create organisations and structures and act in a way that is different from the existing oppressive structure. It is something I totally agree with and is worth thinking about for anybody building organisations.
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I hope to have the first episode of my podcast in another two weeks. Rejoice!
I have been up and down recently, but hopefully I can get out the next newsletter on schedule.
Have a great week ahead!