And that’s the hallmark of dance-pop: every element blends together into an intoxicating sound, where the hooks and rhythms are so hooky, the shallowness is something to celebrate.

And there it is.  I tend to think that the shallowness we celebrate is the shallowness that offers us escape from who we currently are.

Russell Brand, in this heartfelt interview without comedy, destroys his own SuperMe.  He also seems capable of becoming a cultural prophet.  Really incredible.

Dear Gunny,

We’ve had a good lunch here at Bonefish Grill!

Things were totally awkward at first.  But after some wine and Mussels Josephine, we warmed to each other.  We’re wrapping up and thought we’d write you a letter.

Whoever anonymously organized this lunch:  she never showed!  Very, very strange.  But the rest of us did.  Early on, Niya took charge and asked: what are your best and worst memories of Gunny?  We heard great memories: bedrooms filled with cotton ball snow and hidden gifts, walks around Sufi picnics, Monkeytown open late just for you, and magic at DiFara’s.  There were also, however, stories of snooped emails, Xmas party arguments, and examples of your hyper-vigilance.

When all was said and done, we came up with some advice for you.  Some of it is brutal.  Here it is, take it or leave it, dude:

1. Your jeans are, like, six years old.  You should really look into that.  For a guy who loves jeans as much as you do, you’re wearing the equivalent of Nick Lachey on your legs.  Seriously.
2. Stop resenting maintenance.  You hate maintaining things you’ve already done, discovered or accomplished.  To you, maintenance feels rote and devoid of adventure & challenge.  But when you let simple, basic things slide, it’s really, really unattractive.  Thankfully, you’ve made huge changes in the last few months.  Don’t let those slide.
3. Resolve your hyper-vigilance.  We get it.  You’ve seen first-hand how women gradually deceive themselves into crossing boundaries we shouldn’t.  You’ve helped other men’s girlfriends cross that line yourself.  This makes you hypervigilant in your own relationship.  You’re always looking for early signs of trouble.  You think if you nip it in the bud, the relationship will be safer.  You barter your own freedoms to insulate yourself from risk.  You stay closely watchful.  But there’s a price you pay for that level of vigilance:  you sacrifice your own time and energy.  And you weaken the relationship rather than strengthen it.  And you look like an idiot sometimes.  Trust us:  find a way to resolve this tension in yourself while still acknowledging the dark reality of dating.  You’ll be happier and more mature for it.
4. Build your relationship time around your personal time, not vice versa.  You know the activities that are central to your life:  reading, writing, creating, absorbing things that fascinate you.  Don’t put those things on the backburner for anything.  That’s what attracted us to you in the first place — don’t set it aside.  You keep finding new ways to make this mistake.  Use those newfound personal time management capabilities, kid. LOL.
5. You’re at your best when you see into us (or the relationship) in ways we can’t see.  Okay, so you have some skill at this.  You’re at your best when you’re seeing the big picture we don’t see, and speaking of it openly, passionately, but humbly.  Unfortunately for you, you flail when there’s not mutual openness and insight.  So find a woman who loves this as much as you do.  Don’t date women who are defensive about their shortcomings or who aren’t grateful for critical insights into their own lives.   While you are compatible with many types of immaturity, this is not one of them.
6. Build a relationship together that makes you both so proud you’re almost giddy. No clarification needed.

That’s it for now, man.  We’re about to leave.  The organizer never showed (or never identified herself!), so we’re writing this as a group.

Our favorite part of the day was probably the waitress, to be honest.  She was, like, the best waitress ever.  She had this Mila Kunis sort of look, and was really outgoing and funny.  She kept dropping references to Derrida and Lil Wayne — you would have loved it.  Most of all, she gave off a warmth and a sense that she really cared about each of us, as if it was really important to her that we each got the exact dish we wanted.  At times, she challenged us to order something different and be more ambitious.  We joked that the whole lunch went better because of her, and it’s probably true.  When not waiting on us, she sat at the table right next to us the whole time with a book in her face. She probably wasn’t listening.  I’m sure your secrets are safe.

On behalf of all of us and the mystery organizer:  Glad you weren’t here!

Best,

The Girls

It’s been a fairly productive few weeks, both socially and with the art projects.  Here are some highlights:

• Most of my focus has been on tearing through a body of literature on cultural codes.  This has primary application to my work in advertising, but has yielded a whole new way of seeing interiority and has started to influence the GS projects.  More on this soon.
• @DestroySuperMe is up to 31 tweets with several more chambered.  I’m going to loosen the leash a bit on my “don’t make it sound pretty” restrictions.
• The Faulkner Project has taken a cool turn.  I’ve realized that the Faulkner excerpt alone won’t get the job done, so I’ve added three sections to make a true short film out of it.  There are index cards all over my apartment with shots, notes, themes, and sound ideas.  Done so far:
• The audio storyboard is done.  I know what the sound will be for the whole piece, both in music and voiceover.
• The visual style is set.  It hearkens back to the first film project I ever did.
• I’ve got a bank of ideas for visuals.
• Still to be done:  4 weeks worth of matching visuals to audio, then some shooting, then a month of editing.
• Letters I Wish I’d Have Received will pick up again soon once I edit the letters that are already written.
• The Secret Blog is on the “low” setting right now, largely due to my health restrictions.

Om mani padme hum.

What’s up, man. I’ve got this new personal art project where I use meditative telepathy to read the minds of buddhists, then write them letters in response. Pretty freaky, right!

First up, I owe you an apology. I wrote some stuff I’m not proud of on page 73 of a book on the eightfold path I published several years ago. Long story short, I basically said that homosexuality and premarital sex were improper.  You know what I’m talking about.  It threw you for a loop in high school. I can’t believe it went unnoticed! It would destroy my credibility with the liberal left! These days, I want you to know, I feel bad about it. It was just part of the Tibetan provincialism I grew up with. I just didn’t know any better. I mean, as Kanye says over and over on his last album, “What the hell was I supposed to do?” I mean, 30 years ago we Tibetans still were taught that the moon was a fucking star. Now science teaches us it’s reflecting light. Anyway, sorry for the anti-gay, anti-debaucherous-stuff-you-did-with-that-girl-in-Central-Park rhetoric. You’re good to go.

Second, let’s talk about your journal entry from years ago about Tibet’s stance on China.  As you noted, people discuss non-violence in terms of ethics or efficacy. In reality, you’re right:  it’s branding. The moment one Tibetan farmer picks up a rifle, we’re just like every other small ass country that’s getting stepped on. As long as we’re non-violent, we’re unique, and we’re championed by millions of people who project their own powerlessness or power guilt onto us. And that, someday, may prove to have been the single thing that preserved the insights of our culture and allowed them to spread into other cultures, beyond the artifacts and trappings of prayer wheels and goofy hats.

As for why your long-term girlfriends never ask you about your Buddhist practice, I think you know the answer to this. They’re just not that into you. Hahahahahahahah. Just kidding. They’re postmodernists who see spirituality as an archaic petitionary supernaturalism. They haven’t read Wilber!  Trust the Dalai Lama on this one, bro.

Dude, I wrote this to you from my iphone and it autocorrected “Dalai Lama” into “Sakai Lama”. Who the fuck is that guy? I need to meet him. We can tour the lecture circuit together. Hehe.

Okay, let me get serious for my last point. You’ve long been driven by an impulse that I want to say is right on. My advice to you is to keep doing what you’re doing in your practice: decouple buddhism from everything. Decouple Buddhism from mandalas and mantras. Decouple buddhism from those bracelets people sell. Decouple buddhism from eco-friendliness, from activism, from music, from other buddhists, from Tibet. Most of all, decouple buddhism from me. Continue to find it in your own experience — not just in your small day-to-day self that irons your shirts or struggles through a bad relationship, but in the part of you that intersects infinity.

Okay, man.  Gotta run.  Keep it real!   And tell Koo my favorite poem is “I Just Got Out of a Serious Relationship.”

Sincerely,

His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama

There are several projects running right now.  I’ve been really careful to design them in a way that I can keep current on all of them while still, you know, getting out a few times a week.  Thank god for the books on personal organization I read last year.

As one dear friend recently opined,

“Keep this fucking thing up. Don’t be like blogging one minute and then dating some [example of the type of person I've mistakenly dated before] the next. This shit is too good to lag. You have a duty to America, bitch.”

So here’s the latest architecture of current projects:

• The Secret Blog is still on fire.  In less than a week, the ad campaign, now on hold, saw over 500,000 (half a million!)  impressions and more than 700 Facebook followers.   New material is ready for next week.  For several reasons, not the least of which is my sobriety, this project will see about one post per week.
• There have been 13 tweets for @DestroySuperMe.  I’ve already got the next two weeks’ worth written.  They should be coming about one a day.    This project is going to run its course soon, then go dormant.
• Letters I Wish I’d Received has several drafts waiting to be finalized.  The first should be up later tonight.
• Six Fathoms will get attention whenever I have new thoughts on ad stuff.  I don’t care about frequency.
• The Faulkner Project came roaring back this past week with some new directions and the first storyboard.  This project is very different than the rest.  It will take months of serious, sustained concentration.  This thing has taken some good turns lately, with two unique creative challenges solved, but is still in its infancy.  I’ll have updates regularly.
• Life Can Change in a Day, originally slated for launch last week, has been put on the backburner.  It will be an easy project to run at some point, but I have to pick and choose these days.  The Letters project came out of nowhere 3 days ago and seems funnier and more interesting to write.

That’s it for now.  Thanks for tuning in and for all of your support in emails.

Sometimes I have this fantasy of receiving a letter from someone.

Not just a note or a card (those are lovely) but a real letter.  There are so many wonderful things about receiving a letter, the most wonderful being that a thoughtful person has decided to dedicate an entire evening, if not more, to ruminating about you, the world, and how you and the world are intertwined.  As Kenneth Koch once said, “There’s a pleasure in being the source of someone’s sublime thoughts.”

The problem is that, even when I’m the source of sublime thoughts, people rarely write me letters.  Or even write me back after I’ve written them a long ruminating letter on the nature of their existence and the world. Carrin, Xan, Allison, Tracy, Maura, Jessica, you were the only ones who moved me with letters!

Why do others not write?  Do they get so wrapped up in the vanity of receiving a letter that it never dawns on them to write one back?   Perhaps they don’t like the letter, but don’t they have the courage to write back and disagree?  Or are they afraid their letter won’t amount to much?  Do they worry their letter might reveal the parts of themselves they’ve hidden?  Do they prefer to leave their inner geography unmapped?

So I’m launching a new project in which I write letters I wish I’d have received.  In the past week, I’ve worked on outlines or drafts of:

Enjoy.

That journey began back with my old agency, but accelerated last year when I got obsessed with CP+B.  CP+B was the correction of everything I’d thought was wrong.  Last year I’d sit in my apartment at night, 3am, watching Alex Bogusky videos on YouTube, drinking bourbon, eating lupini beans, and taking notes.  The journey continues today with the digital agency where I work.  Who knows where it will lead in the future.

As you may surmise, none of these projects are really independent of each other.  The art projects and my philosophy of advertising are really two sides of the same drive toward exploring that gap of unspoken stirring.

Thanks to everyone who made the first 48 hours so successful.  It feels good to build something again.

• @DestroySuperMe is now launched and will have daily tweets.
• The blog project I’ve been talking about for the past month or two is finally launched and public.
• The Marginspace (you lookin’ at it) has been redesigned and converted from an incoherent mishmash into a hub for updates on all of the personal art projects underway — and the thoughts & feelings that inspire them.  From thoughts on love to advertising to humor to culture, there is quite a bit chambered right now.

I’d also like to thank all the people who made the week great:  Koo & Anna for a night of jawdropping hilarity, Aristotle for tons of bourbon and conversation over Korean, Grza for his normal panache, Karen & Noah for the pizza and hospitality, the Polens for clearing the palate and reinstating the old tribe, and Miss Christina for a very feisty night at Beauty and Essex.