One of the best pieces of writing I have ever read was Mona Simpson’s eulogy of her brother, Steve Jobs, which was printed in the New York Times in 2011. I was sobbing at my desk as I read this thing. Unlike a lot of people, I was familiar with Mona Simpson—she had been named one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists in 1996, though I hadn’t, by that point, read any of her writing. Today, I decided to find her eulogy on the internet, and re-read it, and I cried again.
But something stuck out to me. She said about her brother:
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
Steve Jobs liked beautiful things. His computers were beautiful, compared with the utilitarian, boxy PC competition. I had one of the first Bondi Blue iMacs from 1998. They had a handle on them, as if you would pick them up and carry them around, but they weighed about 40 pounds. I pushed that computer to its computational limits during business school, and I have been in the Apple ecosystem ever since, and Tim Cook has been doing a serviceable job at maintaining the aesthetics.
I like beautiful things. I like beautiful women, though I am not shallow—if I look hard enough, I can find something beautiful about everyone I meet. I knew a beautiful man once—we worked together on throwing parties in NYC. He’d stop you in your tracks. He’s now living in Thailand, selling shirts online.
My favorite artist is a fashion illustrator named Jason Brooks, who lives in London. I discovered him over two decades ago when he was doing the cover art for the Hed Kandi CDs. He draws beautiful people, idealized people, people who do not exist on this earth, but should. The women are thin and have cat eyes and are impeccably dressed. A few years ago, I worked up the courage to write to him and ask him to do a portrait of me and my wife, in his style. It wasn’t cheap, but now I have it hanging in my house, and it is my most prized possession. I am now a Jason Brooks model. I plan on writing to him again and asking him for some of those old Hed Kandi covers so I can hang them up in my music room in my new house. I hope he is rich.
I am an accomplished backgammon player. Actually, I don’t play backgammon, but acey-deucey, a much more entertaining variation that was popular in the U.S. Navy during World War II. My wife and I have played each other at least ten thousand times, on a $20 board we got from Wal-Mart in 1996. One of my subscribers told me about a French company that made high-end backgammon boards, called Hector Saxe. I ordered one, and had it shipped to the U.S. It’s absolutely gorgeous, made by hand, out of leather. It’s a beautiful thing that I own, and I play on it, too.
I wish I was beautiful.
I am not. I’m overweight, but working on that, and making some progress. I have a giant nose. And I have a turkey neck. Tony Robbins is handsome, with that chiseled jawline. He is selling many more copies of a terrible book than I am of a good one. Sometimes I think about what a massive advantage beautiful people have over the rest of us. But I have also heard that being beautiful is a curse, especially for women. Nobody takes you seriously. I would like to not be taken seriously for a change. Let’s just say that I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. And let’s say that I spend a lot of money on clothes and jewelry to compensate. All that said, I had a surprising amount of game in high school in spite of not being very good-looking. It is all about confidence.
I am not terribly interested in natural beauty. You can put me in the middle of Montana, in the sky and the mountains, and it wouldn’t do much for me. On my first tour of duty in the Coast Guard in Washington State, I had an apartment with a big picture window that looked out over the Olympic mountains. Cool, but I have no plans to move back there. I like cities. The cover images for my Twitter and SoundCloud profiles are pictures of cities at night. In my office at home, I have a picture of the World Trade Center that I bought from a street vendor pre-9/11 hanging up next to my desk. I thought those were beautiful buildings. I love walking along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach at night—the art deco buildings are indescribably beautiful. I like skyscrapers—a testament to the possible, to man’s achievements. I think Montana could be improved by some skyscrapers. I’ll add that Chicago has fantastic architecture. It’s cheap. I could live there, but I doubt I would survive the winter. And San Francisco in the late 1990s was a dang beautiful city. Now, it needs a bath. A subject for another day.
People have strong opinions about music. I fully realize that not all readers will share my love of electronic music. Electronic music is perfect music. The beats don’t slip, nobody’s muting strings on a guitar—I like kicks and synths and claps and hats and basslines and ride cymbals and tambourines. When you learn a bit about how electronic music is produced, you gain an appreciation for it. Notwithstanding all that, pre-2008, I listened to a lot of guitar rock, too, so I get it. Country is good, too, if it weren’t so formulaic, but everything is formulaic—especially dance music. But I am not shitting you when I tell you that I will sit in my car, tears streaming down my face, because of some shimmering breakdown in a progressive house track. For many people, music is people’s only exposure to beauty. They drive back and forth to their shitty job from their shitty apartment in their shitty car, and the only moment of light occurs when their favorite song comes on. They play it over and over again. This is why I like art writ large—music, writing, visual art—you create something that outlives you that people will enjoy for generations.
Speaking of writing. I guess I am an authority on that. I am a good writer, but I am not so good at beautiful writing. You want to read beautiful writing? There is plenty of shoegazer stuff in the literary journals that you read for the line-by-line richness of the writing. I am more of a storyteller, and there is a place for that, too. My friend Turney Duff can tell a story. I’d send him one of my short stories and he’d have lots of helpful suggestions about the plot. He’s got both feet in show business and will forget more about storytelling than I will never know. I actually kind of live in a no-man’s land—my writing is not good enough to be literary, and my storytelling is not good enough to be commercial. Is it art? It absolutely is. Is it beautiful? You can tell me in November when Night Moves comes out.
Baseball is a beautiful game. Opening Day can’t come fast enough.
I don’t smile very much. Which is a shame, because one of the most beautiful things in the world is a smile. Half the time, I’ll go out to lunch and get a $26 salad just so the waitress will smile at me. And yes, I am that lonely.
Jared - you write with a truth and candor that is beautiful in and of itself.
The ending made me sad - w/ your strengths, you deserve all the connection you look for! Would be happy to chat some time about shared interests - EDM, tech, art, life, how it all connects.
Anyway, don't be too lonely - you are touching souls virtually, probably more than you know. Love from ATL, GA.
There's a girl on tiktok who got 17million likes for basically posting her face. Laura someone.. Pretty priviledge is crazy