Contemporary cycling is all about spandex and personal bests. The bicycle designer Grant Petersen has amassed an ardent following by urging people to get comfortable bikes, and go easy. (Rivendell) > These days, some mainstream bikes incorporate electronics requiring batteries and firmware: shifters that change gears at the press of a button, or power meters that collect data on a rider’s output. “So many basic things are being teched out of existence,” Petersen said. He saw this as a function of business incentives: electronics break or need replacement; an upgrade is always around the corner. Petersen’s objections are practical but also philosophical. As bikes become higher-tech, riders lose skills and agency. “A lot of sports have been watered down,” Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, told me. “People are bicycling, but they have a motor. And people are climbing, but they’re climbing indoors. They’re riding big waves, but they’re being pulled in by Jet Skis. Yet there are a few people that are bucking the trend.” > Rivendell’s employees object to descriptions of the company’s following as cultlike. “The other stuff is the cult,” Keating told me. “Putting the suit on, and going as fast as possible, and using the bars like this”—we were sitting at a table, and he hunched over his coffee cup, as if to protect it. “That’s the culty stuff, right? We’re just making nice bikes for regular people.” > About halfway through the ride, I came to a fork in the road. I didn’t know which path the others had taken, and I stood for a while, appreciating the shade of the oak trees, the quiet, the bandanna crisping around my neck. I tried to channel an essay of Petersen’s, written in 2002, on what he calls “underbiking”: taking a bike somewhere it isn’t obviously built to go. “Riding an UB changes how you look at any terrain,” he wrote. “You ride where it lets you ride, walk when it wants you to, and rely more on your growing skills than on the latest technology.” This struck me as a harmonic way of moving through the world > We dismounted in the parking lot. The sun returned to being unforgiving. I had no idea what time it was or how long we’d been out. I wanted to do the whole thing again. I looked at my phone: texts from the babysitter, calendar alerts, a moldering heap of e-mails. “Don’t you just feel like a kid again?” Leto asked, as he and Petersen began disassembling the bikes and loading them into the car. I knew what he meant. But I felt, instead, a very adult sense of longing—as if I had just glimpsed, at a deeply inconvenient time, a new and appealing way to live. > There was something romantic about the Rivendells. They made the other bikes on the road look mean.

Right now, I feel I create my environment with many living beings, and everything appears in my music, really. I made a small pond for rice agriculture, then many frogs and bugs came to live around my studio. The sound of my environment is completely different from before. So I am not only composing music with instruments, I am composing all the sounds together with other beings. That is my music and their music. For the ensemble, I like each instrument (or musician) to stand alone but also intertwine with each other at the same time. I’m not good for structured harmony. I prefer to build each melody, at times making harmonies coincide, just like nature does. Some birds start singing, others listen, and others start singing differently but also as a whole – there is a beautiful harmony of sounds. In a river, some water flows, some drops, some bounds, many actions, and many different sounds and rhythms, but as a whole, that is the sound of a river. You will notice very quickly, if you play the instruments selfishly, they stop singing and go away. If a big airplane comes across and makes a big low bass sound, they will stop singing for a while. That means their process for giving birth gets stopped. That invites less life to come in the future. I heard that since 1990, we already lost 80-90% of insects from our world. This means we also lost birds who eat insects, lost numerous lives on this planet. I want to live in the beauty.

Kendrick is the perfect rapper to appeal to this art-as-puzzlebox perspective, which is sort of the amoral cousin of what the artist and video essayist Brad Troemel refers to as literalism, that strain of 2010s criticism in which an artist’s morality, as well as the values depicted in their work, served as the primary lenses through which the quality of the art itself was determined. The redditization of art rewards a work simply for making references and hiding Easter Eggs within its text. It mistakes “depth,” as in something requiring a bit of work to understand what’s actually going on, for the sort of revelations about life and the world, or challenges to our long-held assumptions, that makes depth itself a worthwhile quality. Ironically, the one true and direct political statement contained in the performance wasn’t planned by Kendrick and his team at all: One of his 400 backup dancers unveiled a Palestinian and Sudanese flag during “tv off,” after which the man was forcibly removed from the stadium and banned from NFL events for life. The protester later said that he found the courage to go through with his plan because of Kendrick’s use of flags in his own performance, but Roc Nation, which produced the halftime show, had already issued a statement distancing itself from the gesture. So much for Kendrick the revolutionary.

i am more keen to work within technical limitations rather than smash my head against them. i am more understanding of how to configure hardware to give it the best chance it can have. i am laser-focused on converting waste into opportunity. all of this has to be cultivated from a place of patience and appreciation. you must understand the value and capabilities of the things around you. your willingness to be behind the curve in this field will be a virtue.

`pbpaste > light_mode.xmp` `exiv2 -i X in light_mode.png` `heif-enc -L light_mode.png dark_mode.png -o dynamic.heic`