Bokeh Is Back (and Better)!
This time around, Bokeh is less filtered, more interactive, and has little to do with what's new and hot in New York. But don't worry: there will be links. Welcome!
Bokeh - What’s That?
I Miss the Old Bokeh (¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
The last time I wrote a newsletter with this name was in 2014, and I was in a very different place—professionally, spiritually, and physically.
Bokeh was born when I was first reading and writing on the internet in the early blogging days circa 2008. I sent friends several links a day, each in individual emails. After prolonged gentle pleading, I consolidated the links into one Weekly Digest.
It was service-y and playful, with insider knowledge of hot new restaurant openings, quirky one-off events, and secret historical spots in New York. It was a repository for the coolest things I encountered while writing on the internet for work.
Bokeh V2 will not be like that.
If I do it right, it will be playful, but topically different—a more honest reflection of what I spend my time doing and thinking about these days.
For one, professionally, I don’t write about food culture, restaurants, or travel on the internet anymore, so I have no obligation to maniacally monitor restaurant openings and publicly form opinions on them. Old habits die hard though, and I still do this for fun.
Spiritually, the drive for audience approval under the banner of a big publication is no longer intertwined with my writing. I’m still Extremely Online at work (I lead growth at a consumer gaming startup), but my writing and my thoughts won’t be run through the filter of how it’ll click best for a wide audience. I’m free!
Lastly, I now live in Paris, France, which means my frame of reference has shifted geographically and physically.
What’s in the New Bokeh?
Bokeh is a photography term describing an aesthetic lens effect: when a subject is pulled into sharp relief against a soft-focus backdrop.
It’s exactly what I’ll try to do with this newsletter.
In most installments, I’ll briefly expand on a topic I’ve been mulling over, noting that it’s just one element highlighted against a blurrier, broader context. I’ll end each Bokeh with a short listicle of a few things I recently liked. (I’ll probably alternate essay newsletters with a Just List version - stay tuned for one next week.)
TBD whether the new Bokeh will interest anybody but me! But I’ll try—and it will exist either way.
I also welcome discussion, crowd-sourced opinions, pushback, clarification, and whatever else feels good.
POST NO BILLS
Analog Discovery and the Renewed Magic of Paper Flyers
Sometimes, my weekend plans in Paris are governed by what I discover the analog way: on paper flyers.
Coming from New York, where it absolutely doesn’t work like this, I find it remarkable and refreshing.
I first experienced this was while living in Berlin in 2019. On a Saturday after brunch, a friend took a picture of a fetish party flyer plastered onto a pole and sent it the group chat to see if anyone was free to go. I couldn’t believe that someone would discover an event like this by chance, on a piece of paper, in such a public space. And actually go!
In New York, I occasionally received cryptic digital flyers in my DMs or email inbox—but I would never go to a dinner discovered on an ad plastered around the city.
There are all kinds of fun ads in New York. The subway ads publicizing businesses or Netflix shows, touting 1-800-DIVORCE lawyers, droopy hims. cactuses, and the gotcha one-liners of Seamless and Manhattan Mini-Storage. The large outdoor flyers downtown (POST NO BILLS!) with minimalist aesthetics featuring someone looking much cooler than me reclining in Sandy Liang.
But there aren’t many timely and actionable flyers that could dictate my weekend plans.
The only ones I can think of are pinned to a bulletin board at the twee cafe in your neighborhood selling treacly blueberry muffins larger than street pigeons. They’re how Dan Smith advertises guitar lessons with pull-off tabs. They’re a little too intimate and earnest to base a weekend around.
In Paris, excellent new art exhibits and concerts are teased on paper ads lining the labyrinthine metro tunnels. There are flyers at the entrance of your favorite hip restaurant that are art-directed by an underground local designer-friend. These flyers clue you into the next pop-up event or meal delivery pack from the ex-sous chef everyone’s raving about.
I like feeling as if these flyers have restored serendipity to my overly digital life. That I can learn about what’s happening this weekend if I just look up from my phone for a minute.
It’s the antidote to osmotically absorbing unsolicited recommendations on digital Feeds.
When I scroll too much, I notice myself unconsciously memorizing geotags that tell me which restaurants and neighborhoods to like, which dish is the dish to order, and which corner of a city’s observation deck has the most dramatic views to photograph. It’s the theme park-ification of restaurants, travel, and taste. This checklist way of moving through the world that makes trending places and our experience of them horrible—overcrowded, overwrought, unoriginal, and not fun. Enough is enough!
Relevant, local flyers have made my physical surroundings worth noticing. They stop the tedious feeling of just floating through, Google Mapping my way from one gold star to the next.
Being confronted with my next favorite thing the analog way, in physical space, makes it feel like it was put there just for me. Like I could discover other astonishing things by signing off.
It’s why the novelty of “discovering” a neighborhood restaurant in Porto or Mexico City or Istanbul—that wasn’t on anyone’s list, you know the one that we stumbled into just because we felt like it—feels sublime.
As if the book I pulled from a give-a-book, take-a-book community library was destined to be my summer read. As if the record I found in a discount crate or the event or restaurant I discovered on a flyer found me too.
Other links and things that resonated with me recently:
Books I found on bookstore promo tables in Edinburgh, London, and New York (analog discovery!) that carried me through the summer - I loved each one:
Elena Knows blew me away: a taut and devastating chronicle of a mother getting to the bottom of the alleged murder of her daughter. It’s about women and what we think we know about ourselves and each other—I cried reading it and still wanted more.
Garden by the Sea telegraphs a wistfulness I need from a beach read, like the book version of 9 pm golden hour light glimmering on the Med that I know can’t last. It’s about fabulous friends summering in Spain over a decade, as told from the point of view of the gardener who watches them fall apart.
Bird by Bird is a meditation on writing and life that is funny, insightful, and direct—exactly what I needed to press send on this newsletter.
Podcasts and related links I keep thinking about:
All of the ways in which Fast Fashion and Skincare manufacture anxieties to sell solutions back to us (related to the burdens of Instagram Face and how the 7-step skincare routines of today are the Pond’s Cold Cream of previous generations))
The Rise of Workplace Surveillance and productivity monitoring tools arriving to white collar work;
The road to California’s recent electric vehicle legislation - and this super interesting WSJ piece on the guy at Rivian who lobbies for direct-to-consumer EV sales (instead of going through auto dealerships);
The sudden meteoric rise of Zach Bryan in country-pop music, an anomaly;
A few gripping documentaries and hilarious stand-up routines: Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 made me grateful I was a teenager in the 00s and skipped the Limp Bizkit era; Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard is a business scammer story I watched open-mouthed, because truth really is stranger than fiction; and the One-Armed Chef episodes on foodways and life in remote Scotland and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Great topic! Very inspiring when thinking about running a consumer business and how to promote within your local community.