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2 episodes with Guston
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Following his sermon in the new series, Draw Near, Tyler talks with Guston about how we can read scripture, the role of a broken spirit in the act of confession, and sincerity. Passage: Hebrews 10:19-25 If you have any questions about the sermon, fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Sokuzan leads us through "Opening The Eye Mind" Awareness practice, using as the artwork, "Cornered" by Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein, June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) . Guston was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. In a career of constant struggle and evolution, Philip Guston emerged first in the 1930s as a social realist painter of murals in the 1930s. Much later he also evolved a unique and highly influential style of cartoon realism. But he made his name as an Abstract Expressionist. He avoided the muscular gestures of painters such as Pollock and Kline, and opted for a lighter touch, painting shimmering abstractions in which forms seem to hover like mists in the foreground. More about Philip Guston here: https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2023/philip-guston-now.html https://youtu.be/8Tk1dvNVkTI
Welcome back to another episode of Wings & Things! This week, we visit Guston's Grille, and dive into their buffalo wings. Prepare for mouthwatering descriptions, hilarious banter, and our honest take on what makes Guston's wings a must-try for all wing enthusiasts!But wait, there's more! In our brand-new segment, "Will It Wing?", we ask, will buffalo wing flavored popcorn wing?. Does this snack soar like a hot wing or flop like a dud? Tune in to hear our verdict! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Guston es uno de los pintores más influyentes dentro de las nuevas generaciones norteamericanas. Un artista que atravesó todas las corrientes del siglo XX hasta encontrar un camino de disidencia que lo llevaría a ese espectro atemporal reservado a los grandes maestros de la historia del arte.
Fisher Stevens and I were recently brought close together by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Philip Guston, and one of the greatest footballers, David Beckham. Last September he was in The River Cafe with the producers of Beckham, the series he directed for Netflix. We agreed to have breakfast at my house and the next morning he arrived.Walking up the stairs, Fischer stopped at the large pink Guston. It was hard to tear him away as he spoke about the painting and what it meant to him. A half hour turned into more than an hour as we talked about art we looked at, architecture we lived in and food we cooked. We agreed we would continue the conversation on Ruthie's Table 4 when I came to New York.So here we are, this time in Fischer's house, connected through a love of Beckham, food, film, Guston and each other. Life is good.Listen to Ruthie's Table 4: Fisher Stevens in partnership with Moncler – out now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode, we explore the work and life of Philip Guston, after having visited his exhibition at Tate Modern. Talk about plot twists! Guston's life and exhibitions, even this last travelling one, caused tremendous controversy. But above all, it's his ability to question himself and follow his own ideas that really impressed us.Music: Sarturn
For episode five of our first season we talk to artist Luke Burton. Our discussion is centred on Luke's chosen cultural artefact, the 2004 Philip Guston retrospective at the Royal Academy, an exhibition he saw as a student at Chelsea College of Art, which alongside the 2023-24 Guston show at Tate Modern, bookends Luke's career as an artist. Guston is of course a hugely influential painter and the stylistic switches in his career – from figurative to abstract to figurative – are just one of the subjects we discuss. Also on the table are painting's connections to other artforms, the language of painting, Guston's controversial subject matter, and how we as artists are influenced by the work we see. Please be aware that we do deal with some sensitive material around Guston's paintings of KKK figures which some listeners may prefer to avoid. We end the episode with a podcast extra made up of Luke's vox pops about Guston gathered from other artists. You can see Luke Burton's work in his solo exhibition ‘Westminster Coastal' at Bosse and Baum, London, at the beginning of February 2024. He is also showing at The Gerald Moore Gallery at Eltham College in April 2024.
Welcome back to ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for ArtistsOn today's episode we have the dramatic conclusion of my conversation with the artist James English Leary. Last time, James and I spoke at length about the state of art education. Today we discuss his new watercolors, collecting art, different kinds of change, deskilling, space and depiction, 19th century French painting and how unconditional support for an artists work - like love - is for babies. We also talk Renoir, Matisse, Hockney, Schnabel, Guston, Jack Witten, Ron Gorchov and Howard Hodgkin.This will be the last episode of ARTMATTERS in 2023 so I want to say a big thank you to all of my listeners! I hope you all have a great holiday and a happy new year:)See you back in 2024 for the next episode of ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for Artists.About James English Leary:James English Leary is a painter and psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. His work has been exhibited in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, the Whitney Biennial, and the Sundance Film Festival. He co-founded the artist collective The Bruce High Quality Foundation which was the subject of a 2013 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Leary co-founded the tuition-free art school BHQFU where he was a director and teacher. He has lectured on the sociology and economies of the institutions of art history and taught drawing and painting at The Cooper Union School of Art.If you're enjoying the podcast so far, please rate, review, subscribe and SHARE ON INSTAGRAM! If you have an any questions you want answered, write in to artmatterspodcast@gmail.comAbout the Podcast: Host: Isaac Mann www.isaacmann.cominsta: @isaac.mannGuest: James English Learyhttps://www.kandlhofer.com/artists/86-james-english-leary insta: @jamesenglishleary
Philip Guston (1913-1980) is thought of as one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century. This Tate Modern exhibition is the first major UK retrospective of Philip Guston's work in 20 years, spanning more than 100 paintings and drawings from across Guston's momentous 50-year career. Offering new insights into his formative early years and activism, his celebrated period of abstraction, and his thought-provoking late works. With an outlook strongly shaped by his experiences of personal tragedy and by social injustice in the US, the exhibition charts the restlessness of an artist who defied categorisation, and never stopped pushing the boundaries of painting. RNIB Connect Radio's Toby Davey was joined at Tate Modern by Michael Raymond one of the joint Curator's of the exhibition to find out more about the work and life of Philip guston. Toby began by asking Michael why now was a good time to present Philip Guston's work again to the public through this new retrospective exhibition. Toby and Michael then talked about how much Guston's early life experiences had shaped his work and his outlook on life. Then to a discussion looking at the style of Guston's work over his life and whether he would be using his work today if he was still around to focus on the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis and everything that has been happening in America over the last few years and events around the world too. Toby ended by asking Michael maybe a slightly difficult question, as to whether there were maybe one or two examples of Philip Guston's work from the exhibition that sum up Guston's work to him. The Philip Guston exhibition continues at Tate Modern until 25 February 2024 and audio described guided tours lead by one of Tate's Visitor Engagement Assistants can be booked by either emailing hello@Tate.org.uk or calling 020 7887 8888 More details about the Philip Guston exhibition ‘at Tate Modern can be found by visiting the following pages of the Tate website - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/philip-guston Image Shows Philip Guston, The Line, 1978 © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. A painting which depicts a raw, red hand with the index and middle finger extended, descending from a cloud against a light blue sky at the top of the painting to scrape a line across the deep red ground with a pencil or piece of charcoal held between the two fingers.
Journalist and author Mary Gabriel joins Eric and Medaya to talk about her latest book, Madonna: A Rebel Life. The massive, richly researched biography follows every detail of the superstar's life: her Michigan roots, her debut amid New York's heady underground scene, her film career, her London era, finally catching up with Madge in 2020. The book is also a history of the culture that shaped her, and which she shaped in her wake. Mary discusses writing the book, as well as Madonna's breakthrough performances, the AIDS crisis and its legacy, sweeping changes in the music industry, and a re-examination of the “feminist” as a pop icon. Also, Ross Gay, author of The Book of (More) Delights, returns to recommend a trio of books: Guston in Time by Ross Feld; Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney; and Stealing History by Gerald Stern.
Journalist and author Mary Gabriel joins Eric and Medaya to talk about her latest book, Madonna: A Rebel Life. The massive, richly researched biography follows every detail of the superstar's life: her Michigan roots, her debut amid New York's heady underground scene, her film career, her London era, finally catching up with Madge in 2020. The book is also a history of the culture that shaped her, and which she shaped in her wake. Mary discusses writing the book, as well as Madonna's breakthrough performances, the AIDS crisis and its legacy, sweeping changes in the music industry, and a re-examination of the “feminist” as a pop icon. Also, Ross Gay, author of The Book of (More) Delights, returns to recommend a trio of books: Guston in Time by Ross Feld; Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney; and Stealing History by Gerald Stern.
On Friday I went down to the National Gallery of Art and man I came home in a funk. Usually, I come back super charged up and wildly inspired and just ready to get back into the studio, but Friday was not one of those days. I went down to have lunch with my friend Michelle and after lunch we walked through the Philip Guston show that just opened. I had never heard of Guston before and seeing his work was a very dramatic experience. So much so that after Michelle had leave to get back to work, I ended up going through the show again and taking a little more time on some of the pieces that really resonated with me the first time through. Before you enter the actual show, there's a short video playing on a loop that gives a little background on Guston's life—specifically his childhood as a Jewish immigrant in California, where the persecution of Jews and Blacks by the KKK caused massive trauma that would stay with him for the rest of his life and feature heavily in his art. On top of that, three days after his tenth birthday, his father hanged himself in the shed outside their house and Guston was the one who discovered the body. As a means of processing his childhood trauma, he taught himself to draw and at 14, he started to paint. LINKSNational Gallery of ArtPhilip Guston NowPhilip Guston - WikipediaThe Guston FoundationStedelijk MuseumCONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com Twitter: @jefferysaddoris Instagram: @jefferysaddorisSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Almost Everything in your favorite podcast app to get more conversations like this. You can also find a written version of Iterations on Substack.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris
On Friday I went down to the National Gallery of Art and man I came home in a funk. Usually, I come back super charged up and wildly inspired and just ready to get back into the studio, but Friday was not one of those days. I went down to have lunch with my friend Michelle and after lunch we walked through the Philip Guston show that just opened. I had never heard of Guston before and seeing his work was a very dramatic experience. So much so that after Michelle had leave to get back to work, I ended up going through the show again and taking a little more time on some of the pieces that really resonated with me the first time through. Before you enter the actual show, there's a short video playing on a loop that gives a little background on Guston's life—specifically his childhood as a Jewish immigrant in California, where the persecution of Jews and Blacks by the KKK caused massive trauma that would stay with him for the rest of his life and feature heavily in his art. On top of that, three days after his tenth birthday, his father hanged himself in the shed outside their house and Guston was the one who discovered the body. As a means of processing his childhood trauma, he taught himself to draw and at 14, he started to paint. LINKSNational Gallery of ArtPhilip Guston NowPhilip Guston - WikipediaThe Guston FoundationStedelijk MuseumCONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com Twitter: @jefferysaddoris Instagram: @jefferysaddorisSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Almost Everything in your favorite podcast app to get more conversations like this. You can also find a written version of Iterations on Substack.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris
On Friday I went down to the National Gallery of Art and man I came home in a funk. Usually, I come back super charged up and wildly inspired and just ready to get back into the studio, but Friday was not one of those days. I went down to have lunch with my friend Michelle and after lunch we walked through the Philip Guston show that just opened. I had never heard of Guston before and seeing his work was a very dramatic experience. So much so that after Michelle had leave to get back to work, I ended up going through the show again and taking a little more time on some of the pieces that really resonated with me the first time through. Before you enter the actual show, there's a short video playing on a loop that gives a little background on Guston's life—specifically his childhood as a Jewish immigrant in California, where the persecution of Jews and Blacks by the KKK caused massive trauma that would stay with him for the rest of his life and feature heavily in his art. On top of that, three days after his tenth birthday, his father hanged himself in the shed outside their house and Guston was the one who discovered the body. As a means of processing his childhood trauma, he taught himself to draw and at 14, he started to paint. LINKSNational Gallery of ArtPhilip Guston NowPhilip Guston - WikipediaThe Guston FoundationStedelijk MuseumCONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com Twitter: @jefferysaddoris Instagram: @jefferysaddorisSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Almost Everything in your favorite podcast app to get more conversations like this. You can also find a written version of Iterations on Substack.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris
Philip Guston Now is the biggest international retrospective of the artist's work in a generation. It's debut at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC this month comes shortly after the announcement of a major gift of the artist's work to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Both the retrospective and the donation contain a considerable number of works from the artist's daughter, Musa Mayer. In this podcast, we speak to the National Gallery's Harry Cooper, a curator of the show, about Guston's long and varied career. Cooper also talks about the confusion around Guston's symbolism and difficulty in knowing the meaning or intent of his paintings. After that, we speak to collector Claude Reich about Guston's market and why the artist attracts so many elite collectors yet still remains significantly undervalued compared to his peers.
Ken Winner, wing foil designer extraordinaire talks about his background as a pro windsurfer and how he became a designer at Duotone and developed the first inflatable handheld wing for foiling. At first there was little interest in his invention but once a few people tried it, the sport of wing foiling really took off. Transcript of the interview: Aloha friends. It's Robert Stehlik. Thank you for tuning into another episode of the Blue Planet Show, where I interview foil athletes, designers, and thought leaders. You can watch this show right here on YouTube or listen to it on your favorite podcast app. Today's interview is with Ken Winter, the designer at Duotone wing designer extraordinaire. And as always, I ask questions, not just about equipment and technique, but also try to find out more about his background, what inspires him and how he got into water sports. So Ken was really open in this interview, shared a lot of information about wing design, even showed his computer screen where he designs wings. So that's at the very end of the interview. So you don't want to miss that part. It's really cool if you're into Wing design and wanna know more about the materials and the construction, the design and Ken's philosophy. This is a really good show for all that kind of information. During this interview, I'm gonna play a little bit of footage of Alan Cadiz Wing foiling in Kailua. I got some drone footage of him, which was after this interview, but he's using the 2023 Duotone unit Wing 4.5 meter wing. I'll play some of that in the background. Thank you so much for your time, Ken, and for sharing all the detailed information. So without further ado, here is Ken Winner. Okay. Good morning, Ken. How are you doing today? Good morning. I'm pretty good. All right. It's a little bit of a rainy and windy day here on Oahu. How's the weather on Maui? Same. Same. Yeah. Yep. So have you had super stormy winds the last few days? It's been crazy windy here. Yeah, it's been gusting 45 at times. Do you actually go out in those kind of conditions or do you wait? Yeah. Windy days. Yeah. It's pretty fun. Yeah. So you've been doing what you, what do you do on days like that? You go on a down window or you just go go off? I only do down windows with my wife nowadays. That's her favorite thing. Otherwise I from a friend's house over on Stable Road and Peter actually lives on Stable Road and so we launched there, go out race around a bit, test different wings, hydrofoils. Nice. What kind of equipment were you on in, on those super windy days? Anything from a two to a four. Sometimes we go out pretty overpowered just cause we have something we wanna try and we don't have many choices. Some days we just have to go and do what we can with what we have. We do a lot of prototyping in the four and five meter size. We do a fair amount in the three meter size and then smaller and bigger. We also prototype and test quite a bit, but maybe not as intensely. Nice. Okay. But before we get more into all the equipment and stuff like that, I wanted to get talk a little bit about your background. So tell us a little bit about start in the beginning, like wh how, where you grew up and how you got into water sports and all that kind of stuff. was born a long time ago, 1955, so there's a lot of history there. You don't wanna hear it all. Grew up near Annapolis, Maryland. Did a fair amount of recreational cruising type sailing. My dad owned boats. Built a lot of stuff when I was a kid. Owned a couple boats when I was a teenager. Started windsurfing in 75. How extensive do you want this to be? Started windsurfing in 75, won the world championship in 77. We won again, 80 in 81. We had the right there on Oahu, where you are. We had the World Cup, the PanAm World Cup, which I. Actually, yeah don't worry about making it short. Like we, we got time. So just actually like how did you get into windsurfing? What was your first experience with that? Or what were you doing? Anything other like surfing or water sports before windsurfing? Yeah. No, I've never actually surfed. As I said, I grew up sailing I, when I was a teenager, maybe 17 or 16, I bought a old wooden boat, a little wooden boat, a Bahamas fixed it sailed around, kept it house else. I also bought a shark catamaran sail out bit. So I was into sailing and I, I saw an ad for a windsurfer and thought that would be a good thing for me to try. So wind, Also about the same time bought a hang glider. So I taught myself to hang glide and but I really enjoyed the windsurfing more so sold everything else and just focused on windsurfing. So that you were around 20 years old? Yeah. About 20. Yeah. Did you you have any like formal education or did you go like straight into wind surfing? Yeah, it's funny, I was gonna University of Maryland when I started windsurf, and I might have stuck with that, but I started windsurf and thinking, oh, I can go to college little, a little time windsurfing. And and then when I'm ready to quit, I can go back to school. But I never did actually go back to school, kept wind surfing. For the next forever , 23 years, but ba So basically you're self-taught, like all the knowledge you have on with computers and aerodynamics or, all that is basically from experience and self-taught kind of thing or? Yeah, I do a lot of reading. I remember in, sometime in the early eighties Barry Spanner, I think got a book. The title was The Aerodynamics of Sailing. And I, I heard him make a comment about it, so I got it and I read from cover to cover several times and really absorbed, I think the lessons of that. And did a lot of other reading after that. But that was sort my foundation for learning about the technical side of sailing. , nowadays, of course, it's super easy to get a lot of information online, really good information. So unless you're pursuing a career like attorney or doctor or degreed engineer or PhD scientist, you don't need formal education as much as you used to. If you need it at all, I don't know. But yeah, I think as long as you're a lifelong learner, you can pretty much teach yourself almost anything. . Yeah. Okay. Yeah, a lot of things, for sure. Yeah. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna do some screen sharing here from the windsurfing Hall of Fame. There's little bit of information about you online here. So in the, so you started windsurfing in 1975. That's, this was the day, days when they, the booms were still made out of wood and so on, right? Talk a little bit about your first first wind windsurfing set up bought a used board for 300 bucks and went out, taught myself to use it, and just became hooked like most people. Did it every chance I had. And at first all I focused on was trying to improve my skills. That was hundred percent of my effort. But then gradually over time, I got more interested in improving the equipment. So over time I did some things like. Built my own boards and built my own rigs, masks spoons. Yeah. And you start, you started winning a lot of races, so you were very focused on the com racing side of windsurfing or also I guess freestyle as well, right? Yeah. So I won the freestyle world two or three times, and that was back, it was a much simpler affair than it's now. Of course, the guys who do freestyle nowadays circles around all of us who did freestyle back then. yeah. Around. But you gotta start somewhere in every sport. And so that, that's a picture of Robbie and Jurgen in me at the pan, the Panta actually which was right there on Wahoo. Over in Kai. Yeah. And you were able to beat Robbie, I guess at that point. Still, and you have several world world titles right? In Windsurf racing. Yeah. Robbie and I were rivals to some extent, but he was younger and when he got to be when he achieved his full adult strength, he was extremely hard. I started when I was 20. He started when he was nine. And it's surprise that he dominated the sport so much for so many years. He's a amazing athlete and really great guy. Good entrepreneurs, got a great business. And and we're still rivals. , it's been a good, it's been a good 40 some years. . And then you started build, you said you started building your own boards and making smaller and smaller boards, right? Yeah. So I, excuse me. Yeah I built a a nine foot board. Actually prior to that I had a board shaped for me and glass, and that was a board I would say. I basically invented carving, jives, cause everybody had boards back then. I had a round tail board, which carve through my, instead of skid through them. And basically from that point on, I focused a lot on trying to improve my equipment. I you're showing a picture of the Transatlantic Windsurf race, which was a pretty funny. That was in about 98, I think. But this has gotta be pretty boring for anybody watching. People are interested in what's happening now. Yeah. No, I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I don't think any, what he's gonna find is boring at all, but, , yeah, just yeah. And then I guess you yeah, I tell us a little bit about how you got into the Wing, wing des, or were you designing w windsurfing sales for duo to before kites, or like how, or, and then, yeah. Just tell us a little bit about how you got Yeah. So I went surfed intensely for three years. I guess in 97, I think I won the US Racing Championships. And then just shortly after that I tried kiting for the first time. And basically after I tried kiting for the first time, I I sold on my windsurfing gear and got straight into kiting. My, my first kite experience was with Don Monague right off Stable Road on Maui. He was out kiting. I was out windsurfing and I told him I wanted to try that, so he handed me his control bar and the leashed, his board to my ankle, and he told me how to secure the kite. And I, so I kited back and forth down to Kaha for the next half hour. And so that was my, that's how I got hooked on kiting. And so from the very first session, you were able to stay upwind and everything and no, I didn't stay upwind. I ended up down at Kaha, so starting at camp one, ending up at Kaha. Oh, okay. And yeah and when, not long after that, I spent a week on Maui hiding every day. And and then a few months after that I did some, I did a how kite video. Cause there were no schools, hardly anybody knew how to learn. So I did some videos. Robbie was saying needed somehow to kite videos. So took the opportunity to do that. We sold about 30,000 videos and then of course, schools came along and the internet came along. So that was, there's, you don't need that kinda stuff anymore. It's all online. Yeah. Oh, so you had a, like a VHS tape on how to kite and sold it like through magazines and stuff like that. But I actually, I used the Nash distributor network to the dealer network to sell boxes of videos to dealers who would then them, to 'em, to customers. And I had a website so I could retail videos directly to the customers. And we actually did a total of three howto videos over a couple years time. And then I helped convince boards and more, which is the parent company of Duotone and fanatic to get into kite boarding kit, making kites. . And so that was about the year 2000. And we tried to hire people to do the job of designing kites, but there were so few kit designers at the time that I ended up taking it on. So I had learning design kit weeks and in China working 16 hours a day learning how to use computer aid design software, CAD software, and then pumping up existing kites and trying to figure out the geometry and trying to figure out how to do that on the Ultimately it worked, so we ended up with a decent and started growing the company from that point. Okay. So boards and more at that time, they had Brand was fanatic and or what were their brands that they were run? It, I'm just gonna say Boards and More is the parent company of the, the parent company that I work for now. , which is we produce Duotone kites and Fanatic windsurfing gear and kites surfing and surfing gear and, sub foiling gear. Boards and More is the company I've been working for the last 22 years. And right now what is your official role at Duotone? I know, I just wanted to say I've been waiting such a long time to get you on the show because you're always so busy. You said you have to, come up with a whole new line of wings and kites and everything, so you were too busy to meet with me. But Yeah, tell me a little bit about like your job, like your role and how you were able to make time today to come here, . Yeah. Yeah, great question. I I tend to overcom commit and try to do more things than I can reasonably do. So years I was designing kites, but I also decided to start designing hydrofoils and that turned into a lot of work. And then I started designing wings and that turned into more work. So I was to foil design work off on some very capable guys that we in Mauritius and Germany. And then more recently I've been able to push the kite design work off on Sky now. Sky's been working with me for 18 years. We've both been learning a lot about kite design and in the last year, so I've been helping him master the software that we use for kit design. And so now he's doing the kite design. And I would say that he's for sure one of the most experienced and capable designers in the world, even though he hasn't been the lead on kite design until recently, but he's now and he's doing a great job. He's making some really great improvements. So having a good teacher, right? Hope . So having so now I'm just focused on maintenance, so that, like your job basically at duo tone right now is wing designer? Yeah. I'm focused on wing design now, and we have two main wing models the unit has handled, boom. And. The unit is more focused on wave riding and down winding. The slick is more free ride and freestyle. Unit has a little bit more Wingspan Slick has a little less the okay. So before we go into the current gear let's go back to when you first started winging and like how you came up with The Wing. I interviewed mark Rappa Horse and Alan Ez as well on the show. And they both talked about how, you guys used to go out downwind together with the standup paddle foil boards and and then, when one day you showed up with the wing. So can you talk a little bit about. Like how you first came up with the wing and the inflatable wing design and so on. Yeah, I was trying to downwind hydrofoil with these guys, and I wasn't doing it that well, was having great success and I was getting a sore shoulder. So I was trying to figure out how could I do downwind hydrofoiling and not get a shoulder? And I, by chance, I saw a video of Flash Austin with his homemade handheld wing that he was using on a hydrofoil at Kaha. And I thought eight years before I had designed some inflatable handheld wings for suffering. Not with a hydro, but just for, and so I thought I wonder if something like that would work. It fits my skillset because I do inflatable adult toys. And so I, I went home, got on the computer, designed crude. Another crude, handheld, inflatable wing. So those designs are you sent me an email with some pictures. Is that from that time when you designed your first wings? Yeah. That, that blue and black wing was my first effort to do a handheld inflatable wing. My idea was to use it on aboard, and that was back in two 10 Sky and I tried it. So this one was the one the original one that you made for for basically wind windsurfing on or on a regular windsurf board? Well, a sub board, yeah. Board. Ok. Yeah. And so it was very similar to what we have today, actually, you yeah. It has some similarities. Yeah. And then you would, hold one hand would go here on one hand here. Yeah, that's how it was at first. Okay. And I tried another one a month or two later and Sky and I didn't, we tried and we didn't really think it was that much fun. Another guy who designs for us took the idea and made a inflatable rig. We call it the I rig, which was pretty nice for kids, very low impact. So I remember that. So in that picture of six wings, you can see the first two in two 10, 2011. And then in 2018, I tried something. I just yeah, just very quickly threw something together. I modified an existing neo design and like a Neo's, one of our kites. And sent that off to the factory. And then when I took it to the beach and stepped on the board and sailed away, it popped up. I popped up on the foil immediately and sailed right out to the reef. Turning around, I fell and I had trouble getting going again. But basically I considered that a success and I figured that would allow me to do down windows without stressing my shoulders. I kept building prototypes after that sky went, this was June of 2018. Sky went to a dealer meeting in there and demonstrated it for everybody. Everybody there and nobody was interested. And then we took it to the SI show in August and nobody was interested. But then finally in November, people started getting interested. I got our ceo Alber. He's a, he used to be a snowboarder on the German national team, so hes really good. And he had thought it looked too complicated and difficult, but then when he tried it, he discovered that it's not too complicated and difficult. Maybe we make some of these and people will buy 'em. So at that point we decided we were gonna go into production with wings, and I think some other brands decided at that point. Interesting concept. Of your of your wife, and then you also sent me this little video. So she was the fir you said probably the first woman to wing Foil. Is that, Yeah. Sky's wife, Christine and Julie both tried it out. I think right around Christmas time of 2018. And then after that Julie got very interested in it. And I took her out at KEG quite a few times, and I think this was her first time on the North Shore , and she was a little excited by the size of the swell . So nowadays she, she really enjoys doing downs from to the harbor and she can do it in about 35 minutes if she's in a hurry. And it's her favorite sport. Cool. Yeah. And then this was your first wing design? The foil wing. And I actually got one of those. I've been, I was waiting for a long time and then finally got the wing and I think it was a three meter, the first one I got. And it was yeah, it was super cool because same as you were, we were trying to do the foil doman runs and Really kind. It's really hard actually. But talk a little bit about this first wing design and because it had a boom and no strut and then it had full battens and so on. So talk a little bit about the swing. Your first Yeah. Starting from scratch, we had no, I had no idea really what to do with it. We, we tried differentl angles and different patterns. I put bats in it because that reduces the fluttering by quite a bit. Nowadays we don't have belong bats because we've found other ways to reduce the flutter. Some of us have a lot of brands go ahead and continue making wing wings with a lot of flutter, but I don't really care for that. The boom I made my first few wings with handles as you saw in the photo, and I really hated the handles. Then I went to a kind of a strap on rigid handle. And then after that I thought why should I have a strut and a boom or strut and a handle and I can just have this one boom or long tube and potentially save money and hassle. So that was the reasoning there, but, It turns out the strut is really nice for stabilizing draft. And so we went back to using a strut sometime later. Yeah. Like I know the, that first wing, it was it did that TikTok thing right? When you held it by the front handle it, it didn't really behave very well. Just lefting behind you. It didn't yeah. So was that, I guess part of the reason for that was because it didn't have that strut to of stabilize it. Yeah. I think the strut kinda acts like a ruter in some respects helped stabilize the it's really hard to know what's gonna be important to people when you're starting with something new. One of the, one of the things I have to do is I have. I can't just pay attention to the things I like to do. I have to pay attention to what other people like to do. At first, to me, the idea of holding the wing by the front handle I just never did it. I would hold it by the boom. So never really noticed that instability when I was using it myself. Yeah, but basically, yeah, that's what, how when I used it on a wave, I would just hold the front of the boom and it worked fine. But but then, yeah, I guess some of the other wings were really stable, just holding it in the front handle and you'd be able to surf with it, just holding the front handle, which, which then I guess so yeah. So another thing that's kinda interesting is if you wanting, that will be pretty stable when you're just on the, we experimented with. And the thing we found is that if I let the air out of my wing and let it get a little bit floppy, take it down to three or four psi, it will fly on the leash. Really stable. But then if I pump it back up to eight psi and I haven't really tight 12 canopy, which is something I like, then it's no longer really stable on the leash. So far we kinda have to make the choice. Do we wanna, do we want our wing more floppy and therefore it'll fly on the, or do we want our wing more stable? Which it's less stable on the leash, but it's more stable otherwise. And so basic, so that's basically why you have those two different wings. One is the unit for more that's more, I guess more stable being on supplying by itself. And then the unit is more, has more of a profile. And is that kind of the thought behind it? We go for a lot of canopy tension on both models of wings. We're not gonna compromise on canopy tension cause it gives, it helps give lift to the, when it's, and it improves power when you're pumping. It improves de power and stability when you're overpowered. So we're not gonna compromise on canopy tension but the difference, one of the differences between the slick and the unit is the unit has more sleep. In the leading edge, and that helps improve the stability. While it's, if you're surfing a wave and holding it by the front handle, the fact that it has more sweep than the slick makes it a little more stable in that respect than the slick. But then the downside is you have more wingspan, so it's easier to catch a wing tip, by sweep. You're saying like the leading edge in the front is a little bit more like this versus that kind of thing? Or, but what do you mean by sweep? Sweep is the you know how some airplanes, like a fighter jet will have wings that are swept back. And some wings, like a sail plane will have wings that are not swept back. . So sleep is that back angle in the leading edge. Understood. Okay. And DL is the up angle in the leading edge. So we've done quite a bit with different DL patterns and some things I thought would be better weren't. So I thought a progressive DL would be more stable than a linear dl. And a linear DL is actually more stable. So the new unit has a very linear DL shape and uhno. Another thing that's kinda interesting is some wings have very little dl and the advantage of that is when the wing is lying flat on the water, it's less likely to flip over. The disadvantage of that is it's hard to have a, with a deep canopy and with a lot of canopy tension when you have little, so again we're giving up the fact that. . Our wings when they're lying belly down on the water, are more likely to flip over than somebody else's mic. But on the other hand, we have the ability to put in more depth while maintaining really good canopy tension cause we have more behavioral. So would you say there's a downside to having more canopy tension? Like to, to me it seems like the more tension you have, the, the better the profile works, but I guess like sometimes on a wave or whatever, when you're luing it, it has a little bit more drag, right? Is that, or like what's your experience with a tension? The canopy tension gives you less drag if you have, if more canopy tension gives you less drag when you're, but the wing is more stable while if it has A bit less canopy tension. If I let some air pressure out my wing and make it have less canopy tension, it'll flutter more. And that makes it drier and sad to say it makes it more stable. Yeah. Cause it basically when it doesn't have a lot of attention, it can just completely flatten out and just flutter flat. Versus attention has, it still has that profile. Yeah. So thet thing you can have is a wing that flaps and flutters and loves, but that drag impart a certain amount of stability. I see. This is one of those things where you, it's hard. It's hard to get, it's hard to get everything you want. Divorce, trade offs. Okay. So maybe talk a little bit about things you've tried early on that were that ended up on the trash tape and versus, like things that, I guess like the full battens, you said in the beginning you tried them or used them to reduce the flutter, but I remember those battens used to break really easily too in the waves, right? So the, they're thin battens. Yeah. So early on I never really even imagined I would be using a wing in the waves, which is why I didn't mind putting bats in . They don't, they're not really compatible that way. It's, I did make a three strut wing early on. My, my fourth wing in 2005th wing in 2018 was a three stru wing. And it was, perceptively heavier. So I didn't make any more three str wings for a while. So by, sorry, by three struts you mean three inflatable struts? Like this kind of Yeah. So the blue one? Yeah. The 3.0 from July of two 18. Yeah. Yeah. I tried that and it was, not a great wing and a little on the heavy side. So I decided I was gonna try to stick with just one strut, and then actually went to a home after that. For the simplicity and the low cost and so forth. So the three stru is something I abandoned early on, but it does have potential advantages. So we've been doing more work with that. F1 has a nice three wing. It has its pros and cons, but there are people who like it. And one of the reasons is the fact that you have strut takes away the corner, the the back corner at the tip of a wing, and that's the place people drag most often when they're trying to get going. Getting rid that, I'm sorry, screen. Share that again. So what you're saying, like this corner is what drags in the water when you're to get foiling, right? Yeah. And so a certain arrangement of three strut, I certain three strut geometry will get rid of that corner. . So I think F1 actually has like a patent a patent or a patent pending for that third strut. But it looks like you were the first one to develop that. So how does that work? They They, if they came to contesting it with us, I don't think they could win. But I don't think either of us or them are interested in having a fight. So I don't think it'll be a problem for us. So basically when, I know Duotone is also has a, I think you, I know you have a patent for the hand, the rigid handles on the unit. Are there any other patents that you're, you've gotten or applied for and Yeah, we've, and the question is like, why didn't you apply for a patent for the inflatable wings in the first place? Or did you? Because I think in part you have to do it pretty quickly and it can't really be in the public domain. So these wings that I made in 2000 10, 2 11 From what I understand is they were out there in the public domain and they were, they happened many years before. And so just trying to patent an inflatable wing I don't think that was an option. But we've tried to, we've applied for patents on various aspects of the inflatable wing design as, things related to the DL and boom. And trying to think, what can I mention? What can I not, there's some things we do that we don't even talk about because some people. Aren't aware and we don't wanna give them ideas. Yeah, you don't wanna give away your secret sauce. So I understand. Not too, it's not too soon. Yeah. . Yeah. Okay. So actually I had a question from a friend, my friend Steve. He was asking, have you ch or about basically, on windsurf sales where the can doer and stuff, they have a left tube to improve the laminar flow on the bottom side of the, have you tried that? Have you tried playing with that and or what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, that, that's a popular topic. It came up in in connection with kite design years ago, and I think when I was picking up. The first kite that I actually owned from Don Monague, he was talking about that very idea and doing it in connection with kites. And Don Monague has done amazing amount of work along those lines in connection with kites. And if you were to see PDFs, he put all the things you tried, you would be astonished. Don would be a really interesting guy for you to talk to on this. Don Monague. Okay. Yeah. . Yeah, he was the kit designer for Nash 20 years ago, or 23 years ago. , he's moved on to a lot of really interesting things. But he was talking about it then he worked with it then, and it, it's never really worked for kites for a variety of reasons. There's weight, there's the tendency for. Water to get in and weigh down the kite. Complexity, cost and the actual benefit is hard to find. I've also tried to do elliptical, leading edges in kites and where I have two leading edges side by side. Kinda two bladders next to each other kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Trying to thin out the shape of the wing and make it stiffer. And that, that's been really hard to make it work. There are people who, tried this stuff and they, know, somebody's probably gonna succeed at some point someday, but so far hasn't One of the problems with double surface on a wing is that the lower surface tends to keep the flow attached, and that attached flow sucks the second surface down. And actually tends to suck the whole wing down. So we spent a lot of time making sure our wings always lift. If you're locking the wing, it lifts if it, if you get hit by a lifts every, all the time, our wings are lifting. If you add that second surface, boom, your lift goes away. The flow remains attached on the bottom of the wing. As it passes, the leading edge sucks the lower surface down and sucks the whole wing down with it. And this is something I've actually experimented with and tried and observed, so I'm not just speculating here. Interesting. Again, I'm not saying it'll never work, but it's not a slam dunk. It's not an obvious, easy thing to do. And the benefits aren't obvious either, so Yeah. And it's more weight, it's more cost. So we and with wings in particular, we have to worry about weight. Wind surfers don't worry about weight nearly as much as we do apparently. Tis are, you have to hold it, hold that thing up in, in your hand, and light wind especially then the weight really makes a difference. It does. Yeah, for sure. What about rigid wings? I know people have been making rigid wings for on the ice and stuff like that, but and forever, have you played around with that or have you tested rigid wings? Yeah. Yeah. I saw early on I'd like to have a rigid wing that opened up like an umbrella. . And I actually have tried some rigid and hybrid prototype. But the problem you run into there is you lose one of the greatest attractions of wings, inflatable wings, which is the simplicity in the fact that you just blow 'em up and go and when you have rigid components, elements. You make a more complex, harder to rig up. They're less robust because something like a carbon fiber tube can break pretty easily, especially in the waves. And I question whether a lot of people would want give up the simplicity and the robustness of inflatable in order speed or higher or whatever tructure might give you. That's priority for Right. Would working on that for kids and people who aren't fanatical wingers, people who wanna get into it, but aren't gonna be doing it every day, I would, I'm interested in making it better for families rather than, Better for Kailin . Yeah. But obviously you're also very interested in going fast and testing. I know ANCA has told me that you guys go out and race each other and see what's faster and test equipment and that's, he told me about the Mike's lab foil that he let you know, you let him try your foil and then he got one himself and I just got one recently. So those are, yeah, just having a fast foil makes a big difference that alone, right? I do going fast up to a point about the Mike's slab, what happened was during the pandemic we had a shortage of fanatic hydrofoils. We weren't getting the latest stuff. We weren't even able to get anything out China for a while. My wife is pretty into getting the latest stuff. So she ordered Mike's lab hydrofoil and she got it and she actually had a hard time with it, so I started using it. So I used it a fair amount. But she went to an 1100 Mike's Slab and that worked really well for her. Then she moved to 800, which worked well for her. Then she went to a and that worked well for her, and now she's, now, she now, I dunno she's in the five 40 to 800 range nowadays, depending on what she wants to and so through all that I've been using her hydros as well. But I also use, fanatic has some new stuff that I also use. Peter Slate, who I sail with a lot, is using fanatics and he's going really fast with, he's hard to keep up with. And Alan, of course is very hard to keep up with too. Yeah. And I, sorry, should, when we're talking about fast and I should say don't try to go faster race, because I think that but I'm not sure how to put this. I think that racing with slow equipment is actually more interesting than racing with fast equipment. In the old days of windsurfing, we raced with really slow boards. Didn't matter that we were going slow. Cause the important thing was trying to use the wind and the waves and whatever we found out there to go a little bit faster or to take a slightly shorter course than the next person. So I don't of speed as requisite on the, and. just getting on the water and racing with the stuff you have is pretty interesting. . Yeah, I that's I guess the beauty of one design racing where everybody uses the same equipment and it's not an arms race and it's more about this, your skill and sta strategy and so on, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think of it as the most social form of winging on the water because you're actually doing something with other people. And it's a very sort of a responsive thing where you do one thing and somebody will do another thing in response. So you're, there's interaction that you don't have pretty much any other time, except when you're wanting people to stay outta your way on wave, which is different kinda interaction. But getting back to the winging that Alan or Peter and I do if we're racing around side by side, Trying to go faster. What the main thing I'm doing is I'm trying to assess the performance of the wing. I'm trying to, the power delivery, I'm trying to, is the power consistent hit? Does easy to deal with gust? Is it difficult to deal with the gust when a gust hits, do I accelerate or do I just slow down because there's so much drag? And then, we'll go upwind and we'll go downwind. And if we're going downwind, we can, whether we can deeper with one wing rather than another. This all translate into performance that even someone who's not racing is gonna appreciate. And you can notice subtle differences between wings when you're side by side with somebody of equal ability. But you can't notice if you're just out there cruising by yourself. So that, that, I think that's a real valuable thing for us. But the other thing we do is we've got Finn and Jeffrey Spencer out there on our wings. They test every prototype that comes in. They write our little report and every wing that that comes in, they go out, they loop 'em and spin 'em and race around with them. Do everything that anybody does with them and evaluate them in very thorough, in a very thorough manner, I think. Yeah. I think originally they used to ride for what's it called? They used to write for Slingshot. Slingshot, yeah. So how long have they been writing for Duotone? The last few months. Okay. Yeah, they're amazing wingers. Talk a little bit about the r and d process. I guess it's like you can't really make too many changes at once yet, right? You have to change one, one variable at a time, and then like how many prototypes go into like how many prototypes do you have to make to come up with next year's wing, kind of thing. I'm just curious about that. Yeah, so for the 22 4 meter unit i, I design I name every prototype with a, from the alphabet. So I got down to Q on that one. I'm not sure how many. That's maybe 20 or so. And each one is one that you actually made. Is it just a, do they all make it to the, to be actually samples, or those are all actual samples that you made or that's a good question. I might starting design and try five different variations on my computer. , but they'll all be the same letter. That might be, it might be, okay. Four B dash one or four B dash two and I'll, okay. I'll look at all those and then I'll decide which one I wanna try and in person. And I'll send the, I'll generate patterns. Send the patterns to the factory. The factory, ship it out a week later, or five days later. And then we'll test it. But, I can go through dozens and dozens of prototypes before we finalize a line like, The unit from size two to size 6.5, which is 10 sizes. And we do build and test every size before we put any big into production. Yeah. But I guess on Maui, like basically the four meter is your, like that's the one you start with and then once you have a good four meter, then you start working on the other sizes. Is that kind of how you do it or? Usually I'll do a four or a five in a lot of iterations. I'll also do some sixes. I'll also do threes. I did quite a few threes on the latest slick design because it can be hard to get a three meter working really well. So we , we made six or seven threes before we felt like we were in the right ballpark with with the slick. Yeah, because you can't really use the same design and just make it bigger and smaller because obviously the bigger wings the, one of the issues is that they have too much wingspan, so you have to make 'em kind of lower aspect and then, but the smaller wings, it's not, the wingspan isn't so much of an issue. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like the differences be from your bigger swing to your smallest w in the same lineup, or is that Yeah, that's exactly right. The wingspan, the aspect ratio can be a little bit higher in the smaller wings. With the bigger wings, we haven't really gone over seven and we haven't adjusted the aspect ratio that much up to there. But in the future we'll probably have a seven and an eight with a little bit lower aspect ratio. Another thing you can't scale exactly is. Pretty much everything. You can't scale. Exactly. You have to make adjustments with everything. So if you take a five meter that you like and you wanna go smaller, you actually as a percentage have to go bigger with diameter of the leading edge. And because if you were to scale those down exactly to a, like a three meter, the leading edge wouldn't be big enough in diameter to get the stiffness you want. And then it goes small wing. You really want a stiff leading edge. Cuz otherwise when you're winging and gusty wind, it'll just bend. Yeah. And that, let's talk a little bit about that, the leading edge diameter, like the what you learned about that from all your designing and where, what are your thoughts on that and also the different materials. I know you're doing the unit D-lab with the a Lula fabric and stuff like that, and can you make the diameter thinner with the different fabric if you have more pressure and so on. Just go talk a little bit about that. Yeah. At first of course I was trying a lot of different diameters to see what seemed to work OK at my weight. And one of, one of the issues we have is people of all different weights are doing the sport. And we have to optimize around the average weight of the average writer wrap. So why are you showing that? Oh, I just wanted to bring up some of the wings and the different I was gonna show the aula wings and stuff like that. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Distract you there. Yeah. So leading edge diameter is a huge topic and most of us who test are in the one 40 to one 90 weight range. So we tend to optimize for that weight range. And a four meter wing has a diameter of about 10 inches at the center. And at eight psi or eight and nine psi, that seems to enough, we've. Tried going smaller diameter. When we go to our ULA wings or glab wings are made outta right now and is great cause it's very light. It's very, and you would think that since it's so you could go smaller in diameter, but after making quite a few prototypes with smaller leading edge we see both advantages and disadvantages. So you can have a little less drag if you're going up wind or if you're in a lot of wind, you get less drag with a smaller leading edge. But if you lose a little bit of air pressure, then you have a softer leading edge. And the smaller, the leading edge, the more sensitive it's to small losses and air pressure. So with our DLA wings, our Lulu wings, we've decided to just keep the diameter about the same. And anybody that wants a little bit softer leading edge can run a little air out. And then bigger riders, the 200 pounders or 210 pound riders will have something that's fully stiff enough to handle their weight. That's one of the tradeoffs we've made with leading edge diameter. Another thing, so basically you found that you can't really even though the all Lula can handle more pressure, you can't really reduce the the leading edge diameter by much? Not yet. We can. It's just when we do it, we find that we're not happy with the tradeoffs. . And so we're leaning toward being conservative. We won't, we don't want. We don't want people to have unreasonable we don't want their expectations to be stymied. Yeah we're getting the best all around performance by keeping the leading edge diameter pretty substantial. Recently, for example, we made two identical slick prototypes. One with standard leading edge diameter. One with maybe a not quite a 2% drop up a about a two centimeter reduction from about 10 inches to a little over nine inches. And the smaller leading edge diameter had advantages as we expected. If we were going up wind and a lot of wind, the guy on the smaller levy edge had a, had an advantage. But overall it had a little less power, little less grunt. And if we lost a little bit of air pressure, it had a little less stiffness. And we felt like those were big enough problems to keep us away from that. Okay. So can you talk a little, sorry, go ahead. Another thing we did related to leading edge stiffness is we put a two 30 gram Dacron in the center. That white panel, those white panels in the center are a heavier, stiffer Dacron. So we put those in a place where there's a lot of stress on the leading edge and both in terms of point loading where the strut attaches and that leading edge handle attaches and the leash touches. And it's also a point where there's a lot of bending load. So that helps make our leading edge differ. I know a lot of brands will double up on their clock there. , which we did at one point, but we really prefer the single layer of two 30 gram Dacron. It's very robust. Interesting. Can you explain like how, why you recommend different pressures for, depending on the size of the wing, like I, I see you're the 2.0, you're recommending 12 psi and then for the 5.5 7.5 and kind of in between. So can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. The load on the seams, first I should say the closing sea of a leading edge has the most load on it. Of all the seams, it has twice the load on it. Segment, the inter segment seems are the ones between panels of, so we do a lot of testing to try and maximize the strength of our closing. But one thing about closing seams is the load on the closing sea is related to, it's proportional to the pressure times the diameter. So if you have a small diameter, you can have higher pressure without overloading the closing sea. But if you have a big diameter, have to have lower pressure to avoid overloading the closing scene. And think every, everybody understands this in the business. They're all recommending higher pressure for small and lower pressure for big, and it's all related to how much load the closing can handle without breaking. I. I see. Okay. Do you our standard Dacron construction can handle 15 or 18 PSI in a four meter size before it breaks. And I've, I. Done test tubes. I do a lot of test tubes where we test the strength of seam and I've done test tubes where I've taken it up to five psi in the standard diameter for four meter before its, so we do actually quite a bit of lab testing and bench testing on things like strength and cloth strength. So the difference between the unit and the D-lab unit is basically just the material of the leading edge and the str. Is that correct? Otherwise? Yeah, that's correct. Another difference is that the materials stretch a little differently and they require different seam construction. So I can't use the same patterns for the D-lab that I use for the unit. Customize the patterns for the D-lab wings. To make adjustments to allow for a different, not just different stretch, but also different shrinkage because different scene construction will take up more cloth. know, One scene construction might take up X amount and the other scene construction will take up 1.5 x amount. So I have to make those adjustments in the patterns. And then I've noticed let's talk a little bit about the flutter in, in wings. I noticed looks like the unit has like this little tiny Batten thing versus the D-lab doesn't have that. Is that what's the reason for that? No. The D-lab has it. They just didn't put it in the graphic. Okay. They both have it. But that's one thing I noticed, like the first generation wings, they would get really baggy quickly or after a few months of using them, they would get all bagged out and and you would lose a lot of performance and there would be a lot of flutter in the, in especially in the trailing edge. So how did you, do you eliminate that? Or how are you able to get away without battens in the trailing edge and avoid fluter stuff like that? About a year and a half ago we decided we were gonna attack that problem and we built some wings with different materials stronger rip stop materials for the canopy, and we sent 'em out to team writers in schools around the world and got feedback on how durable the different materials were. And so the material we use in the canopy, the white material in the canopy of the, no, not that one. That, so that one has standard kite rip stop, which is 50 gram rip stop, which is pretty good, especially if you get this panel alignments right. And you get the warp orientation. But then the wing, you're showing now the 2023 D-lab which I think is coming up tomorrow. Oh wow. That has our, what we're calling mod three for modules, three ripstop material in the canopy. So the white material in that canopy has three times the bias stretch resistance of the standard kite style. Rip stop and. That makes it not only more resistant to things like rips when you drop it on your hydrofoil, but really makes it more durable and a higher performance material. It makes our standard unit feel more like a D unit because it's more solid and when you're pumping it, you get better response. It's not a spongy response, it's a, it's more rigid response when you hit a gust. The draft is really super stable. So all around it's a big improvement. There's a small weight penalty of course. But we've, we did some testing where we built three nearly identical six meter wings and we put different amounts of this mod three material in the canopy of each one. So they would in weight by bit. And we founded the canopy with the most, with the largest amount of this material in it was far and away the best performers. So we decided to put in all of our wings for 2020 canopy. So that, so basically that combats that bagginess after, after using it for a while. That doesn't stretch as much, basically. Exactly. Yeah. I just noticed that. Okay. Yeah. So this is the traditional canopy, the mod three. You just have less stretch and especially in the d diagonal direction, right? Yes, exactly. So I just noticed that for the unit. You recommend, the D-lab wings, you recommend a lower pressure than the regular unit wings. Why? Why is that? You get more stiffness for the pressure, know, whatever you're given pressure is. The D-lab gives you more stiffness, but the thing about all is it's incredibly strong and stiff. It's incredibly strong everywhere except where you put a hole in it. So if we have to sew these things together so they have thousands of holes in them, and we do a lot of reinforcement on the seams with materials that are not alu. , but our testing shows us that these are the numbers we should be using for inflation to be safe. And so even though you might pump a five meter to seven instead of eight, it's gonna be stiffer at seven than Aron wing at eight. Okay. So you, you just said, so tomorrow you're gonna release the new the 2023 wings. I think on your website, this is still your 2022 model, right? So what is the no that DLA you're pointing at is the 2020. Oh, I'm wrong. It's the 2022. You're right. It's got the windows for 2022. So what has changed? I think I've seen Alan with some wings that have two windows here. Is that like one of the ways you can tell, or? Yeah. So the new units. Have windows that are more like the current slick, the 2022 Slick has four windows, not just two of them. Ok. And that improved our, that improves the visibility quite a bit. So talk a little bit about the seam orientation. Because it seems like the seams have a little bit more they don't stretch as much as the fabric, right? So is that, is that you're trying to use the seams to add more basically more tension to the canopy? Is that what your thought is on that or? What I'm doing there is I'm trying with the wing design in general, I'm trying to get more tension from tip to tip across the canopy. And in order to deal with that tension, I'm, or I'm making the thread orientation run tip to tip. So it's more about getting the thread orientation. The aligned with the loads that I'm trying to put in the, and that's actually evolved a bit. Those same angles have changed for 2023. And I surprised there's no photo anywhere of the 2020 threes. They've been out for a while now. . So the Duotone Sports website doesn't have the New Wings. Yeah, I dunno. But yeah, so talk a little bit about the changes that you did make in the wings from 22 to 23 other, I guess the windows, the seams, but what else has changed? Yeah the cloth is a huge thing. It's a really big thing. And up to now, the leading edge materials have lasted longer than the can materials, and you really want everything to break all at once, ideally. So we change the windows, we change the, we increase the depth and the power of the wing a bit. The profile depth is greater. So we are getting more power, but the canopy cloth itself also improves the top end, so we have more wind range overall. We we refined the tip angles, tip angles, tip twist has a lot of influence on wing performance. And so we've been, we've gone through a lot of prototypes trying to find the tip angles that are best. So I'd say we have an improvement in overall power delivery in part cause we've got better control over tip twist. Trying to think what else we've done is I know I'm forgetting something. So the, this wing that Alan Kiddas is using is probably the 23 right? As that's probably A2 three prototype. Correct. That's one of our prototypes where we were trying different canopy materials. Material is one of the materials we tested for use production. And we, we decided not to use it, but it's a very good material. We might use it in the future as possible. Okay. Interesting. Cool. That's cool that , you're able to talk about that it's gonna be released shortly for wing design. What's your philosophy and what are you trying to accomplish when you're designing a wing? I guess for this slick, I really like a wing that delivers power as, very consistently across the wind range. And, I've ridden a lot of wings. I've, I've ridden wings that don't do that. Most wings in the past haven't done that. And we're getting better and better at keeping the power on at all times. I like a, that's always lifting. A lot of people don't have that yet. I like a wing with good canopy tension for low flutter good pumping. Never want, I never really want have to move my hands cause I'm in a, the old days of windsurfing and the old days of winging, you hit a, you have back, wind, move back. You used move handle, or, which is one reasons I liked having a boom at first because I could just slide my hand back. I didn't have to let go and grab another handle. Nowadays the wings, our wings are so stable that I never really have to move my hands back or when lull hits, they're always in the right place. So that's really important to me and I think it's important to everyone when I'm thinking about the sport in general and how to, how to make the sport appealing to more people. I think about the fact that we get families doing winging. We get. No, my, the guy who actually runs our wing brand guy named in Germany, lives just off the Baltic Sea, near Keel. He has a seven year old son who started when he was five. And yeah, I think that's awesome. I love the idea being able to do the sport. So I don't ever wanna lose focus on making it easy, making it accessible, making it affordable. We're a high end brand, so we don't tend to go for the bargain basement type wings. But we do wanna make quality wings at a reasonable price, and I don't wanna lose sight. Yeah. And like in terms of price, like obviously the, a Lula wing is much more expensive, the material like, and like what, how much of a performance advantage do you actually get out of that material and is it, only like someone noticed that, is it just for high performance wing foiling or do you think the average user, it's a big advantage for them to go with a Lula fabric? Yeah, I mean anybody that can afford it will benefit from it. It's just a question of do you wanna spend the money and, know, where are your priorities? You have three kids you have to worry about until spending my wife likes them cause they're light and she doesn't need the stiffness, but she likes the low weight, so she always wants to be on, if possible bigger rider like the. Someone who weighs 200 pounds is gonna really benefit from the stiffness or somebody who likes to jump, who benefit from the stiffness. Most people, it's totally a matter of whether they wanna spend the money or not. You, there's always a benefit and the bigger the wing, the greater the benefit. So a six meter gives you more benefit in aula than a three five in Aula for sure. So let's talk a little bit about the equipment that you use personally. What's your go-to wing like on Maui? I know you have, what, which wing do you use the most, on. We use s scores and fives here a lot. Three. Three fives scores and fives a lot. . On a sea breeze days, sea breeze day when it's blowing six, eight knots, I can be on a seven or eight pretty easily. And. Of course if it's blowing like it has last week, I can easily be on it too. And do you prefer the unit or the the slick wing for your personal use? I really like booms a lot because I can, it's easier to locate my harness lines precisely and I can put my hands anywhere and I can fly one handed. When I say I'm getting from my, from a sitting position to a kneeling position I can one hand the boom and that makes it easier. One hand. But, I used to hate handled wings, but we, our handles are good enough that I like the units also. So what I, it's pretty much whatever I'm working on is what I'm writing. So lately I've been working on slicks mostly and I've been writing slicks mostly. But in the coming few months I'll be working on units entirely and I'll be writing units. So what changes have you made to the slick wing for 2023? What have been? So we did a lot of the things on the new slick that we did on the unit. So we went to the mod canopy, we four windows. We have gone with more canopy depth and more power. We fine tune the tip twist and we had some reflex, quite a bit of reflex in the strut of the 2022 slick. With the new canopy cloth. First I should point out that the thing the reflex did was made it so that the back of the canopy didn't bag out so much when you get gust or if you're out in high wind. So the reflex in the stru improved the top end performance of the slick. By however, with our new canopy, We don't have that bagginess in the cloth. So we were able to tone down the reflex by quite a bit. It's just a maybe three degrees now of reflex in the strut. I should point out also that the wider tips of the flick make it so that the slick benefits more from a little bit of reflex than the unit. The unit has narrower tips and it works different. What else on the slick? We've changed the shape of the strut a little bit. And yeah, o overall it's a lift smoother, lift wing, smoother wing. The power development is actually the smoothest of any I've tried. So when we're sailing along through Guston walls, we feel the gusts less with the slick than we have with any other wing we've ever tried. Okay. And then what about your board and your foils? Like what are your go, what's your go-to equipment on that? Yeah, so I I don't use small boards. I did a little bit a while ago, but I don't jump, so I don't really need a small board. I've been using 75 liter five foot boards quite a bit for the last year or two. And lately I've been on a five four, that's 24 wide and we're trending narrower. Some of us are trending narrower, just cause if you're on a small hydrofoil, if you have a little bit longer narrower board, you can pop up on the foil more easily. But. A longer board isn't necessarily good for waves, so anybody who's on, heavily into waves isn't gonna be on the longer board. I see. There's probably, I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say the ta tail shape, I mean I know it people used to have all the kick tails and all that, but it seems like with the, the smaller, faster foils high aspect foils you need, it's almost like you don't want to pop up at a steep angle. You want to keep that board as flat as possible on the takeoff. So do you still use that kick tail or is it just a flat tail in your Yeah, I haven't used kick tail in quite a while. And I think those were mostly valuable in the bigger boards cause it was hard to some lift. Sinking the tail and getting the nose up is easy. So I think you don't really need any kick for a small board. , the boards I use my mask is about six or seven inches from the tail of the board. So there's just not much back there to keep it from kicking up in the nose. And then how long is your mask? What mass length do you like? I've been using in the 90 to 95 range a lot. And I've used longer, but there's a lot of shallow water around here. Yeah, I was gonna ask what's the disadvantage? So a lot of times it's, it is just like you don't want to hit the reef, right? ? Yeah. The longer, longer mass are either they're, to keep 'em stiff, they have to be a bit heavier and maybe a little thick, which. Not necessarily attractive. And then there's, you always have to look at what the tide's doing. Where I ride I don't like to go out. If there's less than a foot of water a foot above mean water. And if it's two feet, that's better . And sometimes I'll just go to the harbor. If it's a super low tide time of day and I need to test something, I might go to the harbor. Cause at least I know they can get away from the beach without hitting the bottom. I'm curious cuz you've done a lot of testing, like when you get scratches on your foil from the, like hitting the reef a few times all my fos are pretty scratched up. How much does it affect the performance, like in your experience? Hugely. Hugely. Yeah. Yeah. It's terrible. I feel it. I've had, I won't say bad luck, but I have had collisions with things in the water that have destroyed my foils. And you really notice yeah, you notice everything. If you're, if you're sailing with somebody else, you notice because you're going slower all of a sudden, if you're not, yeah. Do you repair it? Scratch, do you try to repair scratches in your foils? Or is there a way to Oh yeah. Fix it. Like how do you repair scratches on the bottom of the foil? I usually try to keep the scratching to a minimum and I'll just use a little tiny bit of two epoxy to fill the scratch. Just, just enough to fill it and then sand it smooth. , I wanna get some epoxy paint so that I can, do a proper paint and sand job on some foils. But I haven't got around to that yet. You can't get a shipp here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that would be like a two-part paint epoxy paint kind of thing. Yeah, there's stuff called DPO out Think Australia that America's Cup campaigns use for their hydrofoils and boats. That's supposed to be really good, but you have to ship it by boat probably, or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, . Okay. And then what we talked a little bit about the Mike's lab foils, but like what foils do you use the most and what sizes and so on? Yeah, so we have a phone has a really nice five 90. It's, I don't think it's in the shop. It's a five 90 front wing that I really like. They, we have a seven, we, we've got an eight 50. We've got sizes, I guess the, I really dunno what's on the website. Okay. You just have a look real quick, but okay. So that's pretty small for you. You have five 90 is pretty small foil size for your you're not, probably not as light as Alan could is or someone like that, right? Yeah, Alan and I use a Mike five 40 sometimes my wife uses it too. And so Alan and I can sail around both being on five 40, but 60 pounds, 50 pounds. So work for most days around here, something like a five 90 is a really nice size for me. Lighter wind days. The seven five is good. It's a very powerful for size. I was looking at the so are they the duotone foils or the fanatic foils did you say? Use those are Oh, the ones you're showing the, there's those are kite hydrofoils. Oh, duo Kite hydrofoils. Okay. And they're not the, they're not the latest stuff. I don't know if we have the latest stuff on the website. Cause it's been quite the challenge to get the new stuff outta Asia. It's basically not in available yet, basically. Yeah, I think so. Okay. So probably by spring on the mainland. Okay. And that, but the, so the foil that. Five 90 that you're saying using, I assume that's a pretty high aspect pretty thin fast foil. Is that kind of what you, how you would describe it? Yeah. It's, yeah, high. It's probably 10 to one aspect ratio and designed to be fast. We have cfd Computational Fluid dynamic in Germany who does, we work for a lot of projects, likeer America's Cup campaigns, and he's designed some profiles for us, for our mask and for our wings that we think are really very competitive. I, Peter rides his stuff all the time and he's extremely hard to keep up with, so I have no doubt that it's fast. , yeah. It's pretty amazing how much the foils have improved over the last couple, or, last three years or so. Coming from the early goal foils, what foils did you start on? I was designing our kite hydrofoils and our windsurf hydrofoils, and we had some decent trading windsurf, hydrofoils. And then when I started making 'em bigger, they weren't very good at first. So I started on some real crap foils. Very difficult to ride hydrofoils. . Then over time they got better and and became pretty easy to ride over the period of some months and maybe a year. Okay. So I just want some of the, a lot of those hydrofoils you just showed on the website or things that I designed Oh, a couple years ago. . Yeah. So actually, let's talk a little bit about the challenges that, during the pandemic, the whole supply chain issues and logistics, shipping issues and things like that, and delays and the demand, obviously during the pandemic when everybody was like staying, could, couldn't, people couldn't go to work, so they added more free time. It seemed like that's when winging just took off, like I know here on Oahu it was like, you just couldn't, we couldn't get enough stuff, there was like more, way more demand than supply. And then now it seems like where it's almost like the op opposite way where there's everything's back in stock and people are back in at work and not buying as much. I don't know, just can you talk a little bit about that and your experience with that? You pretty much said it all except for the fact that when pandemic was. Paradise. There was no traffic, there was no people on the beaches. It was amazing time in so respects sad in many respects, but not
The Comissioner and Robert talk to the gang from Guston's Grill and It's The Journey.org as they bring the fun with unscripted course banter and the best Atlanta sports talk to raise money for Breast Cancer.
Stationary Figure represents Philip Guston's most macabre self portrait. He painted himself plenty, and many of his works explored dark topics. In fact, Guston portrayed the KKK in many of his works. This painting enjoins that morbidity level with self portraiture in a sublime synergy. We see these elements thanks to the specific details Guston includes. But viewers can also learn from what the painter chose to eliminate. Read LadyKflo's collected works. Learn about this painting and many more masterpieces with a click through to LadyKflo's site. https://www.ladykflo.com/category/masterpieces/ Checkout her socials too: https://www.instagram.com/ladykflo/ https://twitter.com/ladykflo
Following his sermon within Free at Last, Raphael is interviewed by Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:18-26 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within It is Finished, a series looking at what God has done with our sins and how we ought to live in light of what He has done, Raphael is interviewed by Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Special Guests: Noah Hess (Cru) and Tyler Henry (Ratio Christi) Sermon Passage: Isaiah 43:25, 44:2; Psalms 51:9 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within It is Finished, a series looking at what God has done with our sins and how we ought to live in light of what He has done, Raphael is interviewed by Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Micah 7:18-19 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within It is Finished, a series looking at what God has done with our sins and how we ought to live in light of what He has done, Raphael is interviewed by Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Isaiah 38:17 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Two years ago, four museums were set to present a retrospective of painter Philip Guston. But then, in one of the biggest controversies to hit the art world in the last few years, it all imploded. Now, the show has finally launched at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston has the story for our arts and culture series, "CANVAS." PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Two years ago, four museums were set to present a retrospective of painter Philip Guston. But then, in one of the biggest controversies to hit the art world in the last few years, it all imploded. Now, the show has finally launched at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston has the story for our arts and culture series, "CANVAS." PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Following his sermon within It is Finished, a series looking at what God has done with our sins and how we ought to live in light of what He has done, Raphael is interviewed by Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Psalm 32 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within It is Finished, a series looking at what God has done with our sins and how we ought to live in light of what He has done, Raphael is interviewed by Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Isiah 53:3-6 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Raphael interviews Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:8-11; Ephesians 6:5-9 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Larry to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:8-11 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:7 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:7 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:3-6 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:1-6 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 20:1-6 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within the Advent series, Guston interviews Raphael about Isaiah 9 Sermon Passage: Isaiah 9:6 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within the Advent series, Guston interviews Raphael about Isaiah 9 Sermon Passage: Isaiah 9:6 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
The Rosenbach is eternally linked to the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic by means of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach's friendship with young Philadelphia book collector Harry Elkins Widener, who died onboard the ill-fated vessel. In this episode of The Rosenbach Podcast, the first in a four-part miniseries about the Titanic, join podcast host Dr. Alexander L. Ames and Rosenbach Curator & Director of Collections Judith M. Guston in the Rosenbach reading room to learn the basic details of The Rosenbach's Titanic and Widener family story, as the two view historic documents and rare books in the collection that record this tragic but pivotal episode in the lives of The Rosenbach's founders.
Following his sermon within the Advent series, Guston interviews Raphael about Isaiah 9 Sermon Passage: Isaiah 9:6 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
The Rosenbach holds internationally-significant collections of fine art, decorative art, and rare books, some of which reside in the beautiful parlor in the historic Rosenbach home. Yet all is not as it seems in this familiar space, which is filled with artifacts documenting the globally-diverse history of early America and the Philadelphia region in particular. In this episode, recorded in The Rosenbach's parlor, Rosenbach Curator & Director of Collections Judith M. Guston tells us about the history of The Rosenbach, the work of curators and other collections professionals, and what the artworks and artifacts on display in the parlor reveal about history and culture.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael about Isaiah 9 Sermon Passage: Isaiah 9:1-7 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael about Exodus 19. Sermon Passage: Exodus 19:7-25 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Returning to our ongoing conversations with Christian artists, Bruce Herman and Bobby Gross discuss the insights of modern art on the nature of God and the human condition. Much of the conversation centers on the work of Philip Guston. Many of Guston's works, including those mentioned by Bruce and Bobby, can be viewed here. Bruce Herman is a painter, speaker, and curator whose art has been shown nationally and internationally in Italy, England, Japan, and Hong Kong. His work is in many public collections, including the Vatican Museums in Rome, Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hammer Museum in L.A. His art and writings have been published in print and online journals. He holds the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts at Gordon College. Bobby Gross is Vice President for Graduate and Faculty ministries at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Bobby is also the author of Living in the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God (IVP, 2009). Bruce was part of the book launch events at Upper House for God in the Modern Wing: Viewing Art with Eyes of Faith, Cameron J. Anderson and G. Walter Hansen, eds. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021). For video of Bruce's presentation at Upper House, see "Welcoming the Mysterious Stranger." As always we invite you to leave us a rating on your favorite podcast app or send us a comment at podcast@slbrownfoundation.org. Credits: music by Micah Behr, audio engineering by Andy Johnson, graphic design by Madeline Ramsey.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Raphael interviews Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 15:22-17:7 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 13:17-22 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 12 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Larry to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 10 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Tyler interviews Guston to see what else he would have expounded or touched upon. Sermon Passage: Exodus 10 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within Free at Last, a series through Exodus, Guston interviews Raphael. Sermon Passage: Exodus 7 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within the Summer in Psalms series, Guston is interviewed by Raphael. Sermon Passage: Psalm 84 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Following his sermon within the Summer in Psalms series, Raphael is interviewed by Guston. Sermon Passage: Psalm 73 If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Raphael is interviewed by Guston, following his sermon within the Summer in Psalms series, which focused on Psalm 44. If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Guston is interviewed by Raphael, following his sermon within the Summer in Psalms series, which focused on Psalm 39. If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Larry Stout is interviewed by Guston, the administrative assistant and Ratio Christi apologist, following his sermon within the Summer in Psalms series, which focused on Psalm 32. If you have any questions about the sermon, make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Guston is interviewed by Raphael following his sermon within the Exodus series, Free at Last, which focused on 6:1-13. Next week we will be starting a summer series on the Psalms. If you have any questions make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Guston is interviewed by Raphael following his sermon within the Exodus series, Free at Last, which focused on 4:18-31. If you have any questions make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Elder Larry Stout is interviewed by Guston following his sermon within the Exodus series, Free at Last, which focused on 4:18-31. If you have any questions make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Cloister Talk: The Pennsylvania German Material Texts Podcast
The multicultural life of early Pennsylvania included a vibrant Jewish community. Judith M. Guston, Curator & Director of Collections at The Rosenbach, discusses early Jewish settlement of the colony and the remarkable Gratz family holdings at The Rosenbach today, which document that early heritage. Ms. Guston also comments on the theoretical and methodological challenges of adopting a material culture approach to the study of past religious and spiritual life, and the meaning of early Pennsylvania's religious plurality for American society today.
Pastor Raphael is interviewed by Guston following his sermon within the Exodus series, Free at Last, which focused on 4:1-17. Pastor Raphael was also asked some questions regarding the passage that he wanted to share and answer. If you have any questions make sure to fill out the form on the Church Center App.
Pastor Raphael is interviewed by Guston following his sermon within the Exodus series, Free at Last. Raphael's sermon was on Exodus 3:13-21
Pastor Raphael is interviewed by Guston following his sermon within the Exodus series, Free at Last. Raphael's sermon was on Exodus 2:23-3:10.
This is part 2 of a 2 part episode where we discussed keto myths that could be keeping you stuck from reaching max keto success. Myth #11 - Keto will make you break out since too much greasy fat results in acne Myth #12 - Keto should be a diet high in dairy Myth #13 - Keto causes fatty liver disease Myth #14 - Following a keto diet will turn you into an insomniac Myth #15 - Keto is bad for athletes Myth #16 - Keto causes gallbladder problems Myth #17 - If you no longer have a gallbladder, you should not follow a keto diet Myth #18 - Following a keto diet will lead to an early death Myth #19 - Keto reduces lean muscle mass Links mentioned during episode: Chat the Fat: Episode 9 Kick it Naturally: High Cholesterol Kick it Naturally: Insomnia Dr. Guston’s Podcast Perfect Keto: Pre-Workout Shake Beet Flow, Ox Bile, Milkgest, Digestizyme, - Natural Reference Episode Download: My 10 Favorite Fat Bombs Listener Question: I’m so confused when it comes to saturated fats. I have always been taught they are dangerous, yet a keto diet seems to promote eating saturated fats with excessive amounts of butter and coconut oil. Should I avoid saturated fats? Product Review: Perfect Keto - Pre-workout Drink, Lemon (our affiliate link)
Aaron Levant is the CEO of NTWRK. He's one of the most exciting builders at the intersection of fashion, culture, events, and media. We discuss launching a profitable car magazine at age 9, pitching Marc Ecko on ComplexCon, raising tens of millions for NTWRK from star investors like Jimmy Iovine and LeBron, being "oppositionally defiant", and how he thinks about his career in thirds.Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow The Come Up on Twitter: @TCUpodEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com---EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Chris Erwin:Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up. A podast that interviews entrerepreneurs and leaders. Aaron Levant:This is a common theme in my career, which some people say ignorance is bliss, I like to say ignorance is rich. What I mean by that is it's like every single thing I've done I don't know anything about. And when you know too much about something, you become institutionalized with fear. It's because I knew nothing about putting on an event or a trade show, I wasn't scared of it. I just did it, and didn't think about it that much. It just happened, and it was luckily successful. Chris Erwin:This week's episode features Aaron Levant, the CEO and founder of NTWRK. Aaron is one of the most exciting builders at the intersection of fashion, culture, events, and media, and he started super early. At just nine years old, Aaron used picture cutouts and a Xerox machine to launch a car mag, and it was profitable. He sold copies to friends at school and advertising to neighbors. Then in his early 20s, Aaron launched a fashion trade show, which he sold to a major exhibition company. There, Aaron had mastered the biggest experiential businesses of the past decade, like when he pitched Marc Ecko on ComplexCon. But Aaron's not just a builder, he's also operationally defiant. He doesn't follow norms and believes that lack of experience is major advantage in launching startups. This mindset fuels Aaron's current business, NTWRK, which powers shopping at the speed of culture. NTWRK is hands down one of the hottest players in content and e-commerce and has attracted backers like Jimmy Iovine, LeBron, Drake, Foot Locker and many more. Now, Aaron's story is remarkable but his character is more impressive. He's unconventional, uplifting, and so grounded. That plus hearing him talk about his future plans for NTWRK and how he thinks about his career in thirds makes for a must-listen. All right, let's get into it. Chris Erwin:Tell me a little bit about growing up in the valley, your household, and what your parents were like. Aaron Levant:Valley here in San Fernando Valley in LA is a nice place to grow up. A little bit of suburbia, very, very close to LA. My parents were amazing people who were very creatively inclined. My dad was in the entertainment business and spent a long time as a writer, television shows, and things like that. So I'd say I grew up in a pretty creative household. My mom actually had a little independent clothing label in the '80s, so I had some adjacency to the apparel business that I properly didn't even realize until years later, but my mom was always involved in that. My parents were very into pop art, into pop culture. My dad's a huge toy collector, he has 50,000 toys. So this affinity for pop culture is something I've been growing up around my whole life. Chris Erwin:Between your father's toy collection and then also being a writer in the entertainment and your mother in commerce, the whole new shoppable entertainment, starting to get where it comes from pretty early for you. When you were growing up, did you think, "oh, yeah, I want to go into Hollywood. I want to be like my dad or I want to do what my mom does." Was that going through your mind at all? Aaron Levant:No, never. I mean, I had no interest in doing anything my dad did. I would say, like most people, probably I wanted to do the opposite of what they did so I never ended... Even though maybe what I'm doing has some connection to the entertainment industry now, I was always going the other way. I would say... I never met him, but my mom's father, my maternal grandfather who I never met, was very entrepreneurial. I felt like I've always had something ingrained in me to be entrepreneurial, which different than what my dad did and being interested in businesses where my dad has no interest in business whatsoever. He almost despises it to a certain extent. So I would say I rebelled against anything my parents did and wanted to do my own thing, for whatever reason. Chris Erwin:What type of businesses was your grandfather building back in the day? Aaron Levant:He was in real estate, which is something I didn't get involved in either. Again, I hear this all by way of my mom and my grandmother, but he was just very entrepreneurial from a young age, always trying stuff, apparently a very, very smart guy. So, I try to think that's where I get some of smarts from, because my dad is just not a business inclined guy. He's all about being creative. Chris Erwin:I think you need both sides of the brain for what you're building right now, so it makes sense. Aaron Levant:Definitely. Chris Erwin:Your entrepreneurial ambitions, my understanding is that they manifested pretty early. I think you put together a car magazine at eight or nine years old, right? And then you were selling that to some of your school friends? Aaron Levant:I still am and was back then interested in cars. Sometime around maybe nine or 10 years old, I had made a car magazine through just, I guess what now be a zine, just cutting up a bunch of other great images of cars from books and going to Kinkos or what was Kinkos now FedEx now, and photocopying it. I went to my next door neighbor who was an Arby's franchisee, and I sold him the back cover advertisement for I don't even remember the price. But I just knew that my magazine wasn't going to be legit unless there was an ad on the back cover. So I guess I tout that as my very first business deal, and then I was selling that magazine at school and at camp. For whatever reason, I just felt like I was always trying to do stuff like that and did various random projects as early on as that all the way till I was 16 when I started doing some form of real business, I guess. Chris Erwin:So it felt like in your pretty early on was that you just wanted to do stuff. You wanted to create, you wanted to try things out. There's just this hustler inside, right? Aaron Levant:Yeah. I'm not even sure where it came, but it just felt natural to me to try to create and try to monetize out those creations. Chris Erwin:I've also heard you describe yourself as you go through your teens years as being, and I think that's persist through today, oppositionally defiant. Is that right? Aaron Levant:Yeah, I think that's an actual word from the DSM, which I think is the book that they use in psychology to define what's wrong with you. It's like the dictionary of mental illnesses. I think my mom pointed that out to me very early, which is I had a tendency to go against authority, for good or bad reason, whether that's kicking the principal in the leg at the first of preschool or doing any number of antics I did through my elementary and short high school years. I always felt the need to go the other direction and go against the grain, against authority. And that was, for some reason, instilled in me, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact I just wasn't interested in being in school or be at camp or being anywhere there was authority figures trying to tell you what to do and how to dictate what you do with your time. It was all very boring and mundane for me. Chris Erwin:Through that resistance earlier on, did that also attract these types of friends and people that you wanted around you? Were you becoming a leader amongst the peer groups saying, "I'm going to do things differently." And people were like, "Yeah, we're going to follow Aaron?" Aaron Levant:I would say, as you know, depends. As I was younger, no, I think most of the kids I was hanging out with were pretty nice and I was the jerk in the group. As I got older, I probably attracted the wrong people, and then I spun out of that when I was 18 years old. But no, I was just always doing wrong for myself, not necessarily with others or for others. Chris Erwin:My understanding is that in 10th grade you get out of high school and then you start interning at GAT. Tell us what was GAT, and why was that interesting to you at the time? Aaron Levant:Probably one of the second or third business adventures was I was really passionate about design and graffiti art and street art all through the '90s when I was a young teen. And being interested in that design and graffiti art and being interested in business, I was trying to figure out how do you make a living out of doing you're passionate about. And then it dawned on me that all graffiti writers were working at GAT, particularly the main place and many other street wear companies doing the T-shirt designs. If you're a great graffiti artist, you're doing topography, it's a great transition into designing t-shirts and make a living for yourselves, so I said, "Okay." I started to develop an affinity to these companies. Aaron Levant:Randomly, a guy I grew up with, Tal Cooperman, introduced me to the owner of that company. Through meeting him a few times, he ended up offering me an internship, and GAT was the definitive late '80s, mid-90s street wear brand in LA. It was such a great opportunity for me not only get close to this company and learn a trade that I was interested in but also be around some of my favorite artists and learn from them and learn a craft which at the time was graphic design for me in the beginning of my career. Chris Erwin:Going back to that moment, were you like, "Yeah, this is the logical progression for how I get into my career."? Or were you a little bit shocked as, "Oh, I wasn't expecting to go down this path, but... "? Aaron Levant:I don't know if I was thinking in terms of it as a career, I was just so excited. I was such a fan, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I forget the days when I was legitimately just a fan of things. I was just so excited to be there, and again, it just became a career but I kind of stumbled into it. I was just genuinely happy to be there just to be a fly on the wall and be a fan. And then over a series of years of sticking around there interning, having low level positions, I turned around a few years later and I'd worked my way up to being a partner in the company. And then I was like, "Wow, well, I guess I turned this genuine interest or passion into a job." Chris Erwin:What do you think helped you rise to become partner so quickly? Aaron Levant:I think being willing to do anything, being willing to work for free in the beginning and then almost nothing, minimum wage for years after that. You don't have any baggage, I'm like, "I was this important guy in this company, so I will the trash out, right? I will do literally anything." He's like, "Go drive to Orange County and pick up this sample." I'm like, "Great, I'll great there right now." Whatever I could do. I was waiting for someone to hand me the ball, and I would just run with it. I was so excited. There's a famous Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G line where he's talking about you got to treat every day like you're an intern, like it's your first day on the job, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I think I genuinely carried that through well beyond the time I was an intern. I think that is what propelled me up, that every time there was an opportunity I raised my hand and ran at it enthusiastically where other people may not have. Chris Erwin:Passion was there and it feels like you were just having fun. You were like, "This is cool. This is where I want to be. I'll work for whatever, but I'm doing this with cool people, and I'm all in." Aaron Levant:At that time, most of my friends were still in high school and then eventually college, and I was well on my way to making my career, doing cool stuff, traveling around the country, so it was exciting. Chris Erwin:Fast forward a bit, and let's talk about the Agenda Show, which was a trade show I think that you were a part of for almost around 15 years. Tell us about what that was and how that came to be. Aaron Levant:Through my job at GAT, the founder of GAT was pretty much my first mentor, and I have a series of mentors in my life that really help shape my career and my life, we would go with Luis to a lot of trade shows with his clothing brand. First it was this big show in Las Vegas called the Magic Show, which is the biggest fashion trade show in the world at the time. It would get over 100,000 attendees. We would go to the show in San Diego called the ASR Show, Action Sports Retail. These were B2B marketplaces in the fashion industry for different segments. We would go out as an attendee, as an exhibitor if you will. We'd buy a booth, and we'd sell our wares to the retailers traveling from all over the world. Aaron Levant:In probably 2001, I had gone to New York to a really small show called To Be Confirmed, which was some guys from London. They had just rented a loft in Soho instead of some huge show at the Javits Center or the Las Vegas Smith Center, they just got a loft and put up some rolling racks and some table and chairs. They had a cool DJ and bar. I said, "This is pretty fucking cool." I looked around, I was thinking, "How hard is this? You rent an empty room and have some people throw ups some rolling racks and you send out a postcard, you invite some buyers and make a cool ambience." I'm like, "I like this." Aaron Levant:That was in the back of my mind. At that time, me and Luis were actually throwing some parties in our warehouse in Downtown LA called Agenda: Art, Music, Beer. It was just something we did as a fun thing to promote our clothing companies. And in 2002, in September, after having a bad experience at the ASR Trade Show, I said to Luis, I said, "Let's turn our Agenda parties into a fashion trade show as a competitor to the BIG Action Sport Show in San Diego." And he said, "Yeah." And in January 2003, a few months later, we rented a Thai restaurant across the street from the BIG Show, invited 30 of our friends. We charged $500 a booth. We weren't really doing it to make money, we just thought we didn't have to pay the other guys $5,000 and we could provide a service to our friends and just do something cool. It just organically just happened. But it was this small little B2B fashion trade show for independent brands that I did when I was 18, 19 years old. Chris Erwin:When you had that bad experience at ASR, you have the conversations and you're like, "All right, we're going to launch the Agenda Trade show," Were you excited, were you nervous, were you scared or was it like, "No, I got this. Of course, we're going to crush this."? What was going through your head? Aaron Levant:This is a common theme in my career, which some people say ignorance is bliss, I like to say ignorance is rich. What I mean by that is it's like every single thing I've done, I don't know anything about. When you know too much about something, you become institutionalized with fear or they say paralysis by analysis, right? Chris Erwin:Yes. Aaron Levant:Because I knew nothing putting on an event or trade show, I wasn't scared of it, and I didn't know to be corky or to be fearful or have any expectation. I just did it and didn't think about it that much. It just happened, and it was luckily successful, but I'm sure it wasn't perfectly executed or anything that way. But I just run into things head first, run into a lot of problems, and don't really do too much research in front end because when you do you seem to scare yourself or psyche yourself out of doing whatever that said thing you're going to do. And I've done that a few times in my career where I don't know anything about it, and I've been successful than sometimes people who do know something about it because they're institutionalized with fear. Chris Erwin:Institutionalized with fear, I really like that. I just wrote down ignorance is rich. I think that's a fantastic phrase. All right, so at Agenda, it seems that you go through a eight to 10 year period of expansion and then realizing, hey, we have to move the venue from San Diego to Long Beach and then into Vegas. You're collaborating but then you're also expanding and some new competition is coming. And there's a lot of details I'll probably skip over here, but along that journey, what are a couple of moments that really stand out to you? Aaron Levant:Three key things. One, I did the business completely independently, first with me and Luis and then later with me and my cousin. I still lived in my parent's house. Any business that people think about now in the world that we operate in, they raise capital, they raise seed money, they raise a Series A, they've got a burn rate. All these businesses have a finite amount of time if they're going to make it or not make it before they basically have to shut down operations or become profitable, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I didn't have that. I didn't even understand that as a concept, so I just kept going even when it was going good and not going bad. I carried that forward for so many years, so many times we weren't making money because we didn't really have many employees, I lived at home with my parents until I was 23 or something. It allowed us to push past the point where most businesses would have given up and go, "Oh, the margin isn't growing, or revenues aren't growing at the right rate." We had no analysis of the business. It was an overwhelming theme that allowed us to ever keep pushing forward, probably sillily at some points, to get to a point where we got actually really successful to then where we almost had to shut because the competition got so fierce. Aaron Levant:In that moment in 2009 when our business was on the brink of going out of business, I think the defining moment for us was we finally pushed further enough and had this organic growth trajectory over many, many years, almost six years at that point, that I met a guy, Roger Wyett and Paul Gomez from Nike and Hurley, and they offered us an opportunity to stop being the small show across the street from the BIG Show. And this was the big judo business moment for us, which was they said, "Hey, how about you step out of this role you're in as being the parasite... " Or I call it the little sucker fish that swims along on the shark. We're all this little cool thing happening across the street from these big behemoth thing. They said, "Why don't you come with us? You bring Agenda to the US Open of Surfing, which is the biggest action sports consumer event in the world. You should put your trade show in the middle of it, there's a half a million people that will be there." Aaron Levant:That was a big departure for us. We were in the verge of going out of business with this one business model we knew, but we were making money finally. And it was like this jump. It was like we had to take this leap off the cliff, and it was either going to work or we were going to be dead in the water. But we're almost going to be dead in the water anyway. So we made this jump and in one year of doing this our business grew 2,000% and we put ASR out of business, which is the company that been in business for 30-something years before that, owned by Nielsen Business Media. It was a huge company, established, respected company by all means. It was this moment where everything changed in our favor and it was almost unprecedented. Aaron Levant:So I think that was for me the real lesson there is to take those big risks, to do something that literally was going to sink the company or save the company and has inspired me to continue to do things that throughout my career. But without that moment, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I never would have done probably anything I've done after that. Chris Erwin:I think it's a takeaway that I'm definitely hearing, it just goes back to what you said, again, like ignorance is rich, because you weren't looking at the business of saying, "What are the right metrics and all of that?" Where if you were looking at it through lens or had different training up to that point you would have shut it down. But you were building a brand, and you guys were just like, "No, there's something here. There's something here." Sometimes early stage businesses, they just need longevity, like stick around enough because most just shut down within three to five years. But with longevity, other opportunities or other ways of thinking about what you have and how it can work and this duo coming from Nike Hurley and saying, "Hey, guys, here's another approach." And you're like, "That's a great idea, let's do it." And it just happens. Aaron Levant:Yeah, that one moment literally defined everything for me professionally, financially. But if we didn't make that far, we never would have had that chance. Even in that moment it was risky, the best risk I ever take. Chris Erwin:So it continues to grow and then you eventually sell to Reed Exhibitions in 2012. What was the reason for that? Aaron Levant:Up until that point, from 2003 end of 2012, we sold the end of December, the day before Christmas we signed the papers, the businesses was completely built independently, no loans from family, no lines of credit, no investors, no nothing. It was just me and my cousin. We owned 100% of the business. We financed the business. It was starting to get big. We were doing millions and millions of dollars in business, tens of millions and was making real EBITDA, but it was one of those things that it's risky and there's our cashflow that was on the line, right? We had built something that was fairly profitable and weighed the risk of... We had just gotten out of the 2008 financial crisis. We saw a lot of bad stuff happen with that. I lived through seeing what happens during 9/11, right? There's all these things that come in. Aaron Levant:We're on this incredible ride, we're making so much money, and we just did the math and said, "Hey, we can continue to do this on our way and carry the risk and something can happen and we can all the value, or we can extrapolate the value now." And I think we did some quick backing up in that. We figured we'd make more money and a lower tax rate than we could in six years if we sold the businesses today, if we kept operating it, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:And there's lots of unknowns in the next six years. Which I'm actually lucky because the business did down trend in the six years following that. It was a calculated financial risk, and I had a bigger vision for the company than my cousin did. He was very risk adverse, also because we owned it independently and it was all our own money and capital on the line. We were just operating four shows when we sold. I took it, after I sold it, to about 30 shows. He didn't want to go along with those things, so ultimately we sold. He exited the business, and I went with Reed and built a whole portfolio of new products, consumer-facing products, conferences, video products. I had a much bigger vision than what we were doing in this small mom-and-pop shop. So I think it really allowed us to take the financial risk off the table and set us up fairly well, but also allowed me to really chase the bigger vision that I had for the company. Chris Erwin:Speaking of risk appetite, it seems that there's this constant leveling up or laddering up where it's like, 'I'm going to try something, and then have a bigger win and then a bigger win and then next." Aaron Levant:It's called gambling. Chris Erwin:Got it. Aaron Levant:It's not a healthy- Chris Erwin:So yeah, the question is, was your risk appetite growing where you felt like, "Hey, as an entrepreneur, as a business leader, I'm increasingly capable and I want to take bigger bets."? Aaron Levant:Absolutely. In every situation in my career, if I had the opportunity to spend 100 I'd spend 100. My cousin would say, "Spend zero." We end up spending 50. It was a good yin yang balance, right? But at a certain point, when your business is hot and you have that moment, there's a reason they say, "Strike while the iron's hot." Right? Every time we had that, that's when I say, "Let's go. Let's double down. Let's quadruple down." He didn't want to go, and I think I've always been in favor of going. I've lost a lot too, don't get me wrong. I've had plenty of horrible ideas but, true believer, you're not going to get anywhere, you're not going to build anything meaningful, anything big by not doing that fairly often, by putting it on the line and rolling the dice on that. I'm a huge proponent of doing that as much as you can without being completely irresponsible, but you have to be slightly irresponsible. Chris Erwin:And maybe we'll get into this as you describe how you built the NTWRK executive team, but do you like having people around you that actually push you even harder and saying, "Yeah, that's a good idea, but here's even bigger, Aaron." Or do you like people that pull you back and then have debate about what's the best path forward? How do you like to build leadership around you? Aaron Levant:I think you got to mix of both. You've got some really good financial people that are helping me keep an eye on whatever that may be, the margin or the burn rate or things like that to make sure that I'm not completely unchecked and doing completely frivolous things. But, yeah, I mean, I think I love having people around me who are more aggressive, who have bigger goals, who are uninterested in doing small things, especially investors, right? You get that internally from staff, like my partner here Moksha Fitzgibbons who's the president of NTWRK, constantly pushing. I thought I was aggressive, he's more aggressive than I am, constantly pushing the envelope, trying to push us to do bigger, faster, be more aspirational. And then our investors who have done all the billion dollar businesses where they're like, "Yeah, that's cute what you're doing, but this doesn't interest us unless it gets X big." Aaron Levant:I love that kind of challenge because it makes me try to think bigger where what may be relative success to me on a scale of my career, to them is a blip on the radar. It aspires me to want to do bigger or to make a bigger impact and create larger brand awareness and to take that bigger Hail Mary pass if you will. I need those people around me constantly. Chris Erwin:All right, so at Reed, you sell Agenda to them but you continued to run the Agenda Trade Show. But then you're also responsible for... I think you launched 30 different events while you're there, including ComplexCon. I mean, I know you're always a dappler and doing different things, but it seems like you were all in on Agenda and now you've got a lot of different babies and children to take care of. How was that transition? Aaron Levant:Yeah. I mean, look, I had never finished high school, never went to college, getting to Reed was an amazing opportunity for me because I worked inside a publicly-traded company at a very senior level. It was like going to college, really learning to work in a structure. But also to them they're a $7 billion dollar company. It wasn't just interesting to buy this little portfolio for trade shows and sit on it, right? I had bigger aspirations, and we needed to make bigger to move the needle for them at a corporate level, so they encouraged my bold thinking and they had the finances to go after it. Aaron Levant:So we acquired a company called Capsule. We got in a joint venture with Complex on ComplexCon, which is super exciting. I launched a educational conference called the Agenda Emerge, which is like Ted Talks for fashion entrepreneurialism and a media brand around that. So all the above, every single way they could they would encourage me to go bigger, faster, think internationally, and really push my ideas to the brink of where they could go. Chris Erwin:What a great partnership because sometimes joining a bigger corporate, they want to throttle you. Things are more controlled, more measured. But it seems like for the type of leader you are and your ambitions, it was a great partnership that actually propelled you and gave you experience I think that was really setting you up for your next phase, which is taking a digital business which was Complex, which I know did start back in 2003 as a print magazine, but it became a huge digital business and then your role was like, "All right, how do we create an incredible RoL event for it. So talk about how ComplexCon came to be. I'm just curious, what was in that initial pitch? What were you thinking? Aaron Levant:The interesting part about selling my company to Reed is that they own all of the Comicons around the world. They own 500 major events, many of which are consumer facing and they really focus them around passionate fan communities, what they call fandom. So it's like packs for video games, New York Comicon, Star Wars Celebration. I learned about this event format, which is really new to me because I was in B2B, and I said, "I wonder if Agenda could become... " And this is also part of the inspiration for something like the Comicon for sneaker heads. Aaron Levant:But I realized that Agenda been building itself in the industry, we didn't have a consumer affinity. So I struggled to say, "How can Agenda do what Comicon's doing?" This light bulb went on in a conversation I was having with another one of my mentors, which is Marc Ecko the founder of Complex Media. We were at this event in LA, and I just said, "Well, why don't we get together and do ComplexCon." Right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I said it almost in jest, and he's like, "Yeah, I like that. I like that." Funny standing there with him was Moksha Fitzgibbons who's now the president at NTWRK, and came over and Marc said, "Hey, tell Moksha what you just told me." I told him, they said, "We like that." And they generally encouraged. And then a week later I was in New York. I scrambled for a week, I put together this pitch deck. I got in the room with Rich Antoniello who was the CEO of Complex and Noah who was editor in chief, Marc, and Moksha, and I pitched them this deck. Aaron Levant:It was pretty basic. It just basically took the blueprint of Comic-Con and applied it to the brand of Complex. They all loved it. I was surprised because it was just such a bold, ambitious idea. We worked for two years from that point. That was January of 2015 I pitched them, we signed the contract in November of '15, and we launched in November of '16. The funniest part about that conversation which I'll tell you, which is everyone was around the table very engaged. Moksha was sitting on the coach. At very end of the presentation I thought I'd done a great job but he looks over from this Blackberry and says, "How much money are we going to make?" I go like, "Profit? You guys, Complex?" "Yeah." I said, "I don't think, $1 million." And he goes, "Do we really care about making $1 million?" I was so deflated at that point. I thought it wasn't going to happen because he was the Chief Revenue Officer, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I was like, "If we don't get his buy-in, this thing's never going to happen." But he actually got on board and was the biggest champion of the thing, and it was an amazing experience. But nothing more than saying, "Hey, let's create the Comic-Con, the fan culture, Superbowl, the world's fair for sneaker and street culture." Chris Erwin:The Agenda was a B2B trade show, this was targeting consumers. Where you anxious about, "Oh, wow, how am I going to drive the same type of traffic and hype and momentum around this event?"? Or was it, "No, I can do this. I'll figure it out, I've done it before."? Aaron Levant:Well, I think that's exactly what I was saying, that's why I didn't just end up doing call it AgendaCon, right? Complex had the consumer reach and the social media reach and the affinity with consumers, and I had the relationship with the brands and the exhibitors and the know-how in event production, so the marriage was beautiful in that sense. It was bringing my offline experience with their online marketing reach and bringing that. Of course, we did a lot more things that neither of us would do, market it ourself almost like a concept promoter, which is new to both of us. But it was the perfect marriage of their audience and our event expertize. That's really why it worked. Chris Erwin:Like you said, when you were at Reed, it was like your MBA. You were like the senior executive of a big public company but you were just doing deals, launching new businesses, and learning a lot about business as you went. This was probably a great change to learn of how can you create an event from a digital business but then really market it through all the paid and earned organic channels. Now thinking about where you in your career, that was probably a great learning experience for you. Aaron Levant:Absolutely, right? There's so many learnings in ComplexCon. I think the number one learning for me was as successful as the event was, the digital groundswell that the event created, call it organic customer acquisition, the earned media, that was so big that that was such an eye-opening experience for me, how much the physical world could influence the digital community so much more effectively than just trying to market to people digitally. That was really my big takeaway and a lot of the inspiration for wanting to leave and come join NTWRK. Chris Erwin:I know at ComplexCon now with $100 ticket prices and incredible curation of products, there are attendees who will spend days waiting in line so that they can get early access to the different product vendors, right? Did you guys see lines out the door in your first year of ComplexCon? Aaron Levant:Yeah, there was thousands of kids lined up around the corner at both sides of the convention center. We had a literal, and I mean this in the most literal sense, a stampede of kids pushing past security, knocking down full-grown security guards, extensions, police officers. People literally almost being trampled to death. It was actually scary. The second year we had people who were stowing away, like when people stow away in a ship. Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:We had kids who snuck in days before and were hiding in a broom closet so that they can get early access. The level of pandemonium around ComplexCon year one and two and three was just so insane. It was dangerous. There were actually people injured and it was also so amazing to see. I was almost trampled to death in the crowd were people fighting for Pharell sneakers at the Adidas booth. It was pretty insane the level that people go to but also I understand not only the passion and the fandom, but if you can buy a sneaker for let's say $120 and we sell it for 5,000 the next day, then you might be running full speed as well. Chris Erwin:Yeah. I imagine you seeing that probably flipped a switch inside you being like, "Well, look at this fan energy and the fandom. There has got to different ways that we can build this to be even bigger and then harness it both in online and real world environments." I think that probably leads, I think, in September 2017 you have a conversation with Jimmy Iovine that you're all starting to think through the new NTWRK business plan, so tell me about that moment. Aaron Levant:Jimmy and his son Jamie, who's my partner, had had a previous business in LA called Meltdown, which was a classic comic book stores. Out of this comic book store they were doing a YouTube show that was... call it QVC meets Comic-Con. It actually started to get a little energy and there was an article written in Forbes Magazine saying it was an innovative idea. They had put a little money into it and were trying to launch as a business and had some false starts. But the idea was there. I got interested with Jimmy around this idea that he was working on, which was the Meltdown thing. They said, "What are your thoughts on this?" It was a loose introductory meeting just to talk about this Meltdown concept. Aaron Levant:I saw it and I inherently understood it. I thought it was a great concept, but I had a little bit of a broader vision around what I thought NTWRK could be. We ultimately changed the name of the company and changed the focus to not just be Comic-Con pop culture focused, it will be a broader youth culture, sneakers, street wear, entertainment, gaming, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:This idea of aggregating the most passionate fan audiences into a platform, procuring the most exclusive drops and having the actual talent who created them present it to you on a daily basis, I thought there was huge merit around it. Ultimately, that night I went home, and I wrote a business plan that ultimately ended up being verbatim what we're doing for NTWRK for Meltdown. I was still working at ReedPop at the time. I felt like over the course of the next few months the conversations I had with Jimmy and with Paul Wachter, who's chairman of our board and runs the investment fund, main seed advisors who funded our seed round, I saw one thing clearly. Not only do I think this was a great business idea but I thought for me I'd done a lot of things in my career, and I think ComplexCon was the pinnacle of my career, but I had the opportunity to come and jump on board and work with a group of people who had a bigger creative vision than I had. Aaron Levant:While I was at Reed, I was the crazy, creative one in the room, and in the conversation with Jimmy and these guys I was the one who was thinking small. They're the ones who had the big, crazy, creative vision. I liked that, where it putting me back on my back to level up. They had just sold Beats for three and a half billion or whatever that was, and they really are epitome of people who take passion around creative and brand and push it to that main stream level. I had relative success but not that level, right? I wanted to be in the midst of that type of greatness and learn from that to take my career to the next level. Chris Erwin:So this happens in September 2017 and then you raise seed round. When does that seed round close and when do you start being all in and focus on NTWRK? Aaron Levant:I quit ReedPop in February of 2018 and then worked on refining the business plan on NTWRK for a few months., and then in May of 2018 raised the seed round, and then we launched in beta in October of '18. From May to October built the team, built the kind of MVP product, and just worked on refining what the business was and what the brand was. Chris Erwin:How much did you raise in the seed round. Aaron Levant:15. Chris Erwin:15 million? Aaron Levant:Yeah. Chris Erwin:What type of team did you assembly around you? I think that was different because you're building a digital product, you hadn't done that before, right? Aaron Levant:Yeah, look, there's three things we do at NTWRK that I have almost no experience with, building technology, becoming a media company, and being a retail company in a way, right? I'd been adjacent to a lot of those things. I'd been on the boards of some companies that have done some of those things, but I had never done it. So that's other part of it, it was super exciting for me. Look, we had to hire a whole new team of people who... I prided myself in the event industry, if you want to hire someone, I knew who all the best people were. This was really easy for me. My Rolodex that was really strong. This was like going in unchartered territory so I had to figure out what I was doing and try to find the right people. I think it was a big challenge for me in a good way and challenged me to spend my network, no pun intended, and go out and find new groups of people to talk to. Aaron Levant:I never hire usually recruiters or people like that, I always do it through referrals. So this was a process, it was 24/7 process of trying to find new amazing people who came from other great amazing organizations. Chris Erwin:Who or what most helpful to you during that time? Was it your board, was it Jimmy? As you were being like, "Okay, I need to have a new muscle to hire these new leaders with capabilities that are unfamiliar to me," what was helpful? Aaron Levant:Yeah. I mean, look, everyone was helpful, ultimately just me pounding pavement, picking up the phone, and trying to... Spent a lot of time LinkedIn, just cold hitting people up. Sometimes great people come to you in interesting ways. Our CFO, COO who's still here today, Emerson, came from a referral for Guston who was the original owner of Meltdown, the comic bookstore. You wouldn't think the guy that has comic bookstore's going to find you a CFO, but he actually found us the best guy. Referral and just always going out there and telling everyone you know, whether it's your aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, colleagues what you're looking for and asking who they know and getting people to send you great people is honestly the best way. Aaron Levant:Everyone was helpful, the board, the internal staff, and me just literally going on LinkedIn like a crazy person and finding people who like they're impressive and just dropping them a cold line. And then I'd have to try and explain to them, "Hey, I want you to come to this company that doesn't exist, that I can't tell you a lot about yet, and it doesn't have anyone else working here. Are you interested?" That's always the fun processes, getting people to leave their careers. It isn't like I'm the founder of some billion dollar tech unicorn and this is my second thing, right? There is some selling involved here. Chris Erwin:But I think that you had had an amazing career to date. You had a pretty rockstar board instead of investors, so when most people heard your pitch, where they like, "Yeah, Aaron, this is exciting, I'm in."? If you were to say the biggest trepidation, people who hesitated, what was the number one reason? Aaron Levant:I would say every department but technology has been, I wouldn't say easy, but we could recruit people. Chris Erwin:Okay. Aaron Levant:Technology is by far the hardest thing because if you're an amazing engineer, if you're an amazing CTO, you're an amazing product person, there's nothing but options for you in this world. Everyone has the same pitch, amazing founders with an amazing backstory, who've had success before, amazing board and tons of money in the bank from some of the top VCs and private equity funds. So, in that case, even though we had a lot of those things, we were in no better footing than anyone else. If anything, we were a step backwards. So I feel like that was the hardest thing, and still is. I think we've come over that hump now. We finally recruited an amazing CTO here at NTWRK, which is Marko who previously led engineering at GOAT for the last six years before joining us, which obviously a very impressive business. But that's probably been the thing that took the longest amount of time. Chris Erwin:I just interviewed Christian, the president of Complex, and he said that what's unique about his team is that everyone there is a fan, either they like hip hop, they like street wear culture, they like music. Was there also a through line that you were bringing from like, "Hey, as I've built my career today and for the team that I know that's really going to exceed here, people need to love this intersection of pop culture and commerce entertainment."? Was that important to you? Aaron Levant:It's always been important to me. I would say it's become, depending on the role, some places more important. We need the foremost experts, authorities, thought leaders, test-makers in those field and people who are picking the merchandise, people who are having a consumer front facing role in our business and has an effect on what you see on screen and what our customer are consuming. Sometimes I would, in the past, I think it was an immature part of my leadership style, is that I would dismiss amazing people who could bring such value. They came from greatness, right? Some organizations have a culture of greatness and excellence, and I would dismiss those people because they weren't into what I was into. Aaron Levant:Often in my career until NTWRK I think overlooked some really amazing people that probably could have helped me along the way. So I think that could be a very arrogant thing to dismiss someone if they don't love sneakers. I don't even really love sneakers to be perfectly honest with you. I think it's both, you need a good mix of finding the best people who are the hardest workers, who are the smartest, who are going to challenge you and bring value to the business and finding the people who are going to help you keep on the center of culture, and blend those people together. Chris Erwin:Before moving into some specific work that you're actually doing at NTWRK and some of the partnerships and the launches, what did it feel like to go from a hustler entrepreneur to now a steward of capital? You had raised $15 million in the seed round, it's a big seed. I believe all your other businesses were bootstraps, you weren't representing investors. So what was that shift like for you? Aaron Levant:Everything I'd done until Reed was completely independently financed by me, and I treated those like real scrappy, scrappy, scrappy businesses, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I was fighting tooth or nail for everything down to what I was paying for an office chair. If someone tried to order a $50 office chair online, I'm like, "You can get it for $38 at Ikea." Those little things, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:My cousin used to call it the million dollar loaf of bread. It's these little things that add up to all of a sudden you've spent a million and you're regretting it. So I was real scrappy in my entrepreneurial days. At Reed, I was scrappy but I definitely learned to be a shepherd of capital in that I was working a publicly-traded company and there's a lot of process there. So I think the two things really set me up well. I understood how to work with large amounts of money at Reed, and I understood how to be a scrappy entrepreneur in my whole previous career. I think I applied both of those things well here. And I went back to trying to be scrappy to the point where even sometimes the board would say, "Aaron, you're being a little too scrappy. You got to spend some money. We gave you all this money, you got to actually buy some Herman Miller chairs." Whatever the analogy is right? It's not all about chairs but I like to use that as the analogy for frivolous spending. Aaron Levant:Look, I feel every day utterly responsible for the investors who gave us money and the LPs for the funds that I need to deliver for them. I put that pressure on myself every day to an extreme extent that I need to return. Like, "Oh, this VCs getting money, whatever, it doesn't work out, one in 10, they'll get their money back." I don't think about it like that, and I hope nobody does who's a CEO. But I feel an absolute personal obligation to deliver minimum tenfold for everybody. Chris Erwin:For the investors who will listen to this, I think they're going to be very happy to hear that sentiment. What also comes out here is that these new investors like Jimmy and Warner Brothers Digital and LeBron also want speed. For a return on capital, it's like "Aaron, yes, being prudent is great, but just move fast. You're on to something and we're betting on you. If you're going to help build this market, and so speed is a major asset." I think that starts to show its face because then you raised pretty quickly after your seed, you then raise a 10 million series A in September of 2019. So that I think that is led by Live Nation and Foot Locker and Drake's also involved. At this point, what are you now building towards, and what are some of the key build highlights that are now setting you up for what we're going to talk about is where NTWRK going in the future? Aaron Levant:What we're really building for is to build the definitive marketplace for youth culture amongst the coolest personalities and pop culture goods, the most sought-after drops and releases across every category that we think is cool, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:And that's a pretty expansive view. I think we aggregating, much like I did at Agenda or ComplexCon, we're finding these passion audiences, we're convincing the most meaningful players in those audiences to create special site specific drops and things for this platform, and now we're just doing in a digital way under much more expansive amount of categories. Aaron Levant:We got the proof of concept in 2018 and '19 and now it's just about now it's just about how do we scale that, how do we get more people on the platform, how do we go from one drop a day to 40 drops a day is what our hope is by the end of next year, 40 unique, specific, custom, exclusive things in one day is a lot, right? Chris Erwin:And to do it over and over again. It's not like you're just building up towards one single day a few months out, it's like this is a daily thing? Aaron Levant:Yeah. And how do we make each one of those not only equal quality, how do we increase the quality over time and how do we take this from a few million people to tens of millions of people, and we become for the overused elevator pitch about our business, the QVC of Gen Z? I think that is exactly what we're trying to do and I don't take objection to that elevator pitch, I actually like it. Chris Erwin:As you think about going from one drop a day to 40 days a day, is there data from the performance of your past drop campaigns of what is selling, what is driving user acquisition that you're using as a data feedback loop and/or is it also a combination of just going gut of like, "This is a cool product, I dig it, we're going to launch with this too."? What is that approach? Aaron Levant:I would say it's 50% gut, 50% data at this point. I think over time it'll become more data. In the beginning it was probably 100% gut because we had no data. Obviously, it's taking learnings from the things that are working, the categories, the personalities. There's a lot of learnings in there around how we scale this business and there's also a lot of surprises, right? I think some of the biggest surprises we learn is just because X celebrity has a big audience, it doesn't mean they sell anything or anyone wants to buy anything from them. There are many personalities that have a much smaller audience, maybe just a few 100,000, that can sell 10X any big celebrity, because they have hyper-engaged audience, an organic audience. Aaron Levant:I think that's been one of the biggest surprises. I think one of our biggest aha moments was in 2018, Ninja was the biggest esport star in the world. He's still a huge star, right? We were like, "Oh my God, if we could just get Ninja to come on NTWRK and sell some stuff," when he was on the Ellen Show and breaking the internet, "we'll get a million downloads in one day, right?" Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:We go, we do this deal with him, we get him on and he's got an exclusive collection for us for holiday and 50 people came. It was nothing, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:New people. It was ridiculously low and it was like, "Wow, it's like sometimes these people that are so big actually don't move culture in a way that you think they do. They're propped up stars for consumption and click-bait but they're not really able to have a meaningful consumer products business." So sometimes you can't just go off the data of how big their social audience is or what their engagement looks like online, things like that, you have to some gut around, do people actually want to buy products from them? I think there's a lot of example of big celebrities who are very much household names but couldn't sell anything. And then there's some people that can create a brand that does billions of dollars, right? Chris Erwin:Wow. Yeah. Aaron Levant:So it's a real hit or miss there and that's really part gut. That almost becomes the more important part. Chris Erwin:It's interesting hearing about that because at my company, RockWater, we are helping different shoppable entertainment companies think about what their go to market launch is. And so we've been reviewing tens of these different live streaming content products. And we're seeing that some of the platforms actually audit the different types of creators or influencers that are onboarding and saying, "Are you a good fit? Are you not a good fit? If we think that you're going to be a premium creator you'll get more customer service resources and we're going to help prop you up." Has your team built any proprietary tech or methods of how you assess the personalities who are going to do a product collaborations with your team? Aaron Levant:I wouldn't say we're assessing them beforehand. We definitely have the post data where we've worked with them. But I would say here's the counterpoint to that even. I'll give you another example, the most successful individual personality on our platform beside Takashi Murakami, is a guy named Ben Baller, who's a celebrity jeweler, podcaster, all around personality. He has a big consumer products business with us. He's been on NTWRK for six months doing multiple things and almost all of them didn't do very well in the beginning. We kept sticking with him against the lack of positive data, right? It wasn't selling through, the audience wasn't engaging. And then eventually we had a breakthrough moment with him. I equate this almost the Agenda thing, you keep pushing forward and we always had a feeling or I had a feeling this guy was working to work and now he's our number two star on the whole platform from a revenue basis. Chris Erwin:What was in your gut that kept you sticking with him, similar to when you were at Agenda? Was it the ignorance is rich, like "No, I believe in this guy, I like him," or was there something else going on? Aaron Levant:Yeah, I believe in him. He was enthusiastic about the partnership, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:Some people, some celebrities they do these things and it's like an obligation. They go, "I got to show up and do this thing and sell this book." They pretend like they're enthusiastic but really they're not. They do the bare minimum. They're like, "oh, I'm obligated to do one social post, I'm going to do just that and then I'm going to take it down." Those people that are going to fight to make their things work. They're going and doing... like GaryVee, great example, that guy is a salesman of salesmen, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:He gets on and he's going to pitch himself like nobody. DJ Khaled, Ben Baller's one of them. They're enthusiastic and they're going to go above and beyond tenfold. And it knew that eventually it would break through, and it did. There were even people inside our own org who tried to kill the partnership, go, "Hey, this guy's not working. We've got all these other products on him, let's put these on the shelf, right?" Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:"Let's not push forward." I'm like, "No, you got to do it." It wasn't anything other than just seeing his level of enthusiasm towards the partnership. I believe that you can bank on that. Chris Erwin:The talent enthusiasm is so key because they have so many opportunities in front of them nowadays of how many different social platforms that they're on, how many different advertisers they can work with, what products can they launch. I remember when I was running Big Frame, the management company under Awesomeness TV, partners would come up to me and ask, "How do I work with your talent? How is this going to be a thriving partnership?" I would always, "You got to sell them on your product and on your vision and not just throw money at them." I would often nix them like, "Hey, if our sales team was pushing too hard," of like this was a big six or seven figure dea where our managers knew that the talent weren't really into it, I'm like, "We shouldn't do this because this is just going to fail and both sides are going to walk away unhappy." Chris Erwin:So I like how you described the enthusiasm is so key. Curious to talk about the future vision for NTWRK and some of the things that you're building towards. I've heard you talk about that you want to festivalize marketing and user acquisition. And I think that there's definitely intent to have many more shopping festivals I think in the new year. Tell us a little bit more about what's your thinking there. Aaron Levant:One of the things that I was obsessed with from day one, even in the original business plan, was looking at things like Alibaba's Singles' Day, which obviously has become since the last three years much more well known thing here in the US, and they made $75 billion this year, I think. They made a week-long event, previous iterations it was a day long event, they made $35 billion. They really took something that was like Black Friday or Cyber Monday here in the US and they made it look like the MTV Music Awards. It was a video first event, it was live stream, and it was crazy, right? And how they entertanmenize shopping, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I took how you took something like a ComplexCon, something like an Alibaba Singles Day and make a marriage between those two ideas and you launch an online shopping festival. That's really what we're doing with NTWRK. In the coming year we're launching six proprietary shopping festivals, each one around a different audience vertical and two big shopping holidays. These are big ideas for us. We did our first one this year called Transfer in August, which was a design and culture festival in partnership with a creative named Edison Chan from Hong Kong and the artist named Futura 2000, which was an amazing event. We had over two billion media impressions on that event, so we were excited about that. We're launching one just a few weeks here called Beyond the Streets which is an online art fare that's themed around street art and graffiti, which previously was a physical event that now we've brought online. And next year we'll have six. We'll do one called Unboxed in February that's themed around collectables and toys. Aaron Levant:We'll do one in March or April called Off Court which is focused basketball culture. Really about packing two days full of content, meaning dozens or almost 50 to 70 exclusive drops in a two-day period, bringing in the talent who created those drops or musicians, athletes, artists to do panel conversations much like we would at some of my physical conventions or festivals in the past, having live music performances, having a gift shop, having physical takeaways we send the people in the mail beforehand, and really entertainminizing and festivalizing this online shopping experience. It's really about taking hundreds of pieces of content that you can usually absorb over the cause of a month and smashing it into a two-day period and creating sensory overload. We're excited about what that does for the businesses on the go forward and how that draws new customers and how that creates excitement, and also stimulates brands and creators who want to work with us, right? Aaron Levant:If you just called and said, "Hey, you want to do something on a Wednesday because it's Wednesday." They're like, "Ah." You call them and say, "You want to be a part of this festival and all the top brands and creators in the world will be there?" It's much more motivating value proposition. Chris Erwin:Are you building this online experience in tech in-house or you're working with a partner to do it? Aaron Levant:It all lives on networks made of IOS and Android platforms, so it's literally sitting right on top of our day-in and day-out platform. It's not a separate experience. And that's the whole point. The whole purpose of this is to draw people into what we do and to utilize the technology and the proprietary native commerce and video technology we build here. Chris Erwin:You are planning six of those events in 2021. Aaron Levant:Six festivals and two shopping days, which is a one-day festival. For example, 10/10 is NTWRK's birthday, so that our annual celebration where we do a huge promotion. We don't want to be a retail company, I think that's a dead asset class, I think it's a boring idea. I think the number one thing for us to do that is we're creating these moments. We'll do some of the standard retail things like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Back To School, whatever, but how we create our own moments and we create our own annualized trend. What if we stacked all of our festivals in the first quarter, which is usually the lightest quarter for retail, what if we could buck that trend by doing all this exciting stuff. Aaron Levant:So we're creating our own retail holidays and creating our own trajectory of what we do and when we do it. We don't want to prescribe to what Macy's does per se. Chris Erwin:I was going to ask how you gauge success of that. ComplexCon will talk about, "Hey, we drive 20 to 30 million of merchandise sales in Long Beach and we're the number one contributor to that economy." Are the KPIs for you, it's revenue but also how it fuels the rest of the business or ability to attract different artists and personalities to the platform for the new year? Aaron Levant:It's all the above. Obviously revenue is an important KPI. Transfer for example was our highest two days of revenue ever during our last festival. Obviously we intend to beat that coming up in the new year. User acquisition, earned media. We had, like I said, two billion media impressions on that. It's also about how many new brands we attract to the platform, new talents, because then those people could have an ongoing relationship with us. Even things like Google Trends data, if you look at the dates around Transfer, some of our highest searches were NTWRK, right? So all of the things are extremely important KPIs or metrics we're going to track, but we want them all. I think that's a great thing about a festival, it solves for every meaningful thing we want to track in the business, the businesses just accelerates that. Chris Erwin:Let's also talk about another big initiative for the company which was your April 2020 investment in FaZe Clan, one of the world's largest esports and gaming collectives. If I understand this right, it was a $40 million round for FaZe Clan and you guys were the lead investor, is that accurate? Aaron Levant:Yes. Absolutely. Chris Erwin:What's the strategy where NTWRK is defining shoppable entertainment and shopping at the speed of culture, and now you're also making a really big investment in esports and gaming company? What is the goal of that? Aaron Levant:I think it's a pretty simple idea, which is we want to be at the forefront of what's happening in youth culture. I liken FaZe Clan as the leading brand in what is arguably the fastest growing space in media and entertainment, which is gaming lifestyle, esports, right? The numbers are astronomical, so when we think about attracting new audiences that are passionate about something, to me it's esports is the skateboarding of the day, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:This is the thing that captures the hearts and minds of possibly billions of people, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:Not just millions, it's a much bigger totally addressable audience here and why not partner with the top brand and organization and the largest brand and organization in that space. The analogy I like to use is that Netflix brings disruption to video streaming, Spotify to audio streaming, NTWRK is trying to do for merchandise streaming, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:This is the category that doesn't really exist. So what makes those platforms destinations is the proprietary content that they have. It's not that we make an investment in a great organization, but we also secured a deal to control the global consumer products rights for that company. And so right now if you go on NTWRK and you scroll down through our feed in couple days from now, we're dropping an exclusive FaZe Clan Beats by Dre headphone exclusively on NTWRK. So when you think about us bringing together a collaboration like that, first time Beats has ever been in the gaming space. Obviously, Jimmy, our lead investor was the founder of Beats, bringing together with the top gaming organization in the world and you can only buy that product on NTWRK. Same analogy like you can only watch Game of Thrones on HBO or you can only watch House of Cards on Netflix. Proprietary content drives new audience and drives revenue and
Painter Clintel Steed talks about his latest exhibition, "Behind the Hood". In this interview, the hood is not just the last stop on the subway, but it also refers to hood worn by the Ku Klux Klan. It was a popular trope for Philip Guston to paint as a challenge to white supremacy. When it was recently announced that Guston's retrospective at the National Gallery was postponed due to the political climate, Clintel had to respond. Other topics in this interview range from his upbringing, misogyny, favorite movies, and surviving the pandemic as artist.See www.instagram.com/i_know_strange_people/ for images and comments.
Black Sea presents an audacious absurdity in oil. Obsessed with the lowly boot heel, painter Philip Guston dwells in a crude and even cruel reality. He creates a vivid, disconcerting portrait. The bare bottom of the boot heel atop dark waters. The plebeian symbol seems to rise like a Roman arch in the canvas center. But with its slanted sides, raw wood, and wonky nails, this heel’s not fooling anyone. No matter where Guston places it, a boot heel bottom holds no majesty. This one doesn’t even have a sole to cover its shabby wooden innards. Instead of elevating the heel, Philip Guston raises questions about it. Given the title, Black Sea, viewers must check out the setting. That valiant, choppy sky’s intriguing compared to the bruteish boot bottom. Canadian American painter, Guston varies his sky brushwork. He mobilizes many hues into an active atmosphere. The sky dances around the banal boot heel. It mocks the stodgy brown stick-in-the-mud. Winds blow and toss. They change with the weather. A boot heel stays what it is – forever. There’s not much to see on the boot’s bottom. We see this crude object from the point of view of a bug. Turns out, that’s the point. Learn more about this and other masterpieces with a click to LadyKflo's Art Blog. https://www.ladykflo.com/black-sea-by-philip-guston/
Ricardo Gonzalez paints moody characters, objects, and scenes that draw influence in film noir and German expressionism, among other things. We talk about his early years, inspirations in music and movies, painting over the parts you like best, the psychodrama of dealing with yourself in the studio, the uses of text and the lessons of graphic design, plus shared anecdotes and inspirations from Guston, Picasso, De Chirico, Twombly, Schnabel, Milton and March Avery and Susan Rothenberg.https://www.instagram.com/ricardo_gonzalez_v/https://joyslow.tumblr.com/https://www.asyageisberggallery.com/artists/ricardo-gonzalezThe Courage to Createhttps://www.amazon.com/Courage-Create-Rollo-May/dp/0393311066My Life with Picassohttps://www.amazon.com/Life-Picasso-Review-Books-Classics/dp/168137319Xhttps://www.julianschnabel.com/https://www.speronewestwater.com/exhibitions/susan-rothenberg_11/installationsThe Mystery of Picasso https://youtu.be/wa-mQcZfslcDream Househttps://www.melafoundation.org/LY_MZ_JHC_DHNov2018.html
"Let's stop talking about Philip Guston and start talking about structural racism." This has been critic Nikki Columbus's refrain through the past season, issuing what many considered the final word of a furious debate surrounding the postponement of a Guston retrospective. Titled "Guston Can Wait" and published October 27, 2020 in N+1, the text (which Columbus reads for the podcast) deftly summarizes the controversy's main thrust - the vehemently-shared opinion that postponing the exhibition was a move based in institutional cowardice - before zooming out for the larger context in which museums are actively undermining and purging their own labor forces; that the Guston furor is distracting from these more pressing issues. "I did have fun writing this," she admits, before stressing, "We have to let go of this myth that we're more progressive than any other sector or business."
"Let’s stop talking about Philip Guston and start talking about structural racism." This has been critic Nikki Columbus's refrain through the past season, issuing what many considered the final word of a furious debate surrounding the postponement of a Guston retrospective. Titled "Guston Can Wait" and published October 27, 2020 in N+1, the text (which Columbus reads for the podcast) deftly summarizes the controversy's main thrust - the vehemently-shared opinion that postponing the exhibition was a move based in institutional cowardice - before zooming out for the larger context in which museums are actively undermining and purging their own labor forces; that the Guston furor is distracting from these more pressing issues. "I did have fun writing this," she admits, before stressing, "We have to let go of this myth that we’re more progressive than any other sector or business."
"Let's stop talking about Philip Guston and start talking about structural racism." This has been critic Nikki Columbus's refrain through the past season, issuing what many considered the final word of a furious debate surrounding the postponement of a Guston retrospective. Titled "Guston Can Wait" and published October 27, 2020 in N+1, the text (which Columbus reads for the podcast) deftly summarizes the controversy's main thrust - the vehemently-shared opinion that postponing the exhibition was a move based in institutional cowardice - before zooming out for the larger context in which museums are actively undermining and purging their own labor forces; that the Guston furor is distracting from these more pressing issues. "I did have fun writing this," she admits, before stressing, "We have to let go of this myth that we're more progressive than any other sector or business."
Tom and Sheila discuss the artist Philip Guston, his work, and the controversy – due to the images in his work of hooded klansmen – that has erupted from the postponement of a major Guston retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, […]
Image via: Andy Adams instagram. In this episode of Explain Me we talk to Andy Adams (FlakPhoto on instagram), a culture producer and long time digital director. Andy is the founder of FlakPhoto Projects, an international community of photographers that operates in a parallel path to the one Powhida and Johnson come from—the New York based studio and museum world. Andy, William, and Paddy began working online around the same time—2003-2005, so we start our conversation there. We track through the exuberance and possibility we saw online in the early aughts, the economic collapse of the late aughts, and fraught political environment we’re now navigating. Subjects include: The signature Flak Photo style, the ethics of documentary photography, and the the postponed Guston show at the Tate. References and reading: Instagram: @photographersvote #photographersvote Two Museums Tried to Sell Art. Only One Caught Grief About it. New York Times Guston Can Wait. Nikki Columbus, N+1 Contra-Internet, Zach Blas, e-flux Journal
Part 2/3 Speeches by: David Guston, Piero Bassetti, Costantino Bongiorno, Paolo Zanenga, Gianfelice Rocca On November 14th, 2016, The Fondazione Bassetti had the honor to host Professor David Guston, Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University. Professor Guston spoke on Synbio and he held a lecture titled "From Frankenstein to Synthetic Biology: Responsible Innovation and the Insufficiency of 'Cool'". With: David Guston - Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University Piero Bassetti - president Fondazione Giannino Bassetti Costantino Bongiorno - WeMake Paolo Zanenga - Diotima Society Gianfelice Rocca - president Humanitas, vice president Fondazione Giannino Bassetti We are pleased to propose the meeting again for its richness of content. Synthesis, video, slide and photos in our site: https://www.fondazionebassetti.org/en/focus/2016/11/game-changing_innovations_and_.html
Part 3/3 Speeches: Guido Romeo, David Guston, Piero Bassetti, Giulio Ceppi, Fiorenzo Galli, Costantino Bongiorno, Fabio Besti On November 14th, 2016, The Fondazione Bassetti had the honor to host Professor David Guston, Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University. Professor Guston spoke on Synbio and he held a lecture titled "From Frankenstein to Synthetic Biology: Responsible Innovation and the Insufficiency of 'Cool'". With: David Guston - Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University Piero Bassetti - president Fondazione Giannino Bassetti Guido Romeo - Sole 24Ore Giulio Ceppi - Total Tool Fiorenzo Galli - direttore Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo da Vinci" Costantino Bongiorno - WeMake Fabio Besti - Fondazione Giannino Bassetti We are pleased to propose the meeting again for its richness of content. Synthesis, video, slide and photos in our site: https://www.fondazionebassetti.org/en/focus/2016/11/game-changing_innovations_and_.html
Full version. Introductions by: Ottavia Bassetti and Angela Simone; Speeches: David Guston, Piero Bassetti, Giulio Ceppi, Fiorenzo Galli, Costantino Bongiorno, Paolo Zanenga, Guido Romeo, Fabio Besti, On November 14th, 2016, The Fondazione Bassetti had the honor to host Professor David Guston, Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University. Professor Guston spoke on Synbio and he held a lecture titled "From Frankenstein to Synthetic Biology: Responsible Innovation and the Insufficiency of 'Cool'". With: Ottavia Bassetti - Fondazione Giannino Bassetti David Guston - Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University Piero Bassetti - president Fondazione Giannino Bassetti Gianfelice Rocca - president Humanitas, vice president Fondazione Giannino Bassetti Angela Simone - Fondazione Giannino Bassetti Paolo Zanenga - Diotima Society Guido Romeo - Sole 24Ore Giulio Ceppi - Total Tool Fiorenzo Galli - direttore Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo da Vinci" Costantino Bongiorno - WeMake Fabio Besti - Fondazione Giannino Bassetti We are pleased to propose the meeting again for its richness of content. Synthesis, video, slides and photos in our site: https://www.fondazionebassetti.org/en/focus/2016/11/game-changing_innovations_and_.html
Part 1/3 Introductions by: Ottavia Bassetti and Angela Simone; Speech: David Guston. On November 14th, 2016, The Fondazione Bassetti had the honor to host Professor David Guston, Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University. Professor Guston spoke on Synbio and he held a lecture titled "From Frankenstein to Synthetic Biology: Responsible Innovation and the Insufficiency of 'Cool'". With: Piero Bassetti - president Fondazione Giannino Bassetti Ottavia Bassetti - Fondazione Giannino Bassetti Angela Simone - Fondazione Giannino Bassetti David Guston - Founding Director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society Arizona State University We are pleased to propose the meeting again for its richness of content. Synthesis, video, slide and photos in our site: https://www.fondazionebassetti.org/en/focus/2016/11/game-changing_innovations_and_.html
Es sollte eine große Retrospektive des Malers Philip Guston werden. Doch die teilnehmenden Museen entschieden, die Schau zu verschieben. Grund: rassistische Aspekte im Werk. Kulturschaffende, darunter der Sammler Harald Falckenberg, protestieren dagegen. Moderation Marietta Schwarz www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Fazit Hören bis: 19.01.2038 04:14 Direkter Link zur Audiodatei
Bis sein Werk "klarer interpretiert werden kann" soll die Retrospektive des US-Malers Philipp Guston verschoben werden. Grund seien 24 Gemälde des Künstlers, auf denen vermummte Ku-Klux-Klan-Figuren zu sehen sind, ein rassistischer und gewalttätiger Geheimbund. Die vier großen Museen - Die National Gallery Washington, das Museum of Fine Arts in Boston und das in Houston wie die Tate Modern in London - bräuchten Zeit, seine Werke, die sich mit sozialer und rassistischer Gerechtigkeit beschäftigen, deutlicher zu präsentieren. Ein merkwürdiger Rückzieher, schließlich war Philipp Guston, Sohn jüdischer Eltern, ein politischer Aktivist, der mit seinen Malereien den systemischen Rassismus im weißen Amerika entlarvt hatte. Elke Buhr, Chefredakteurin von Monopol, dem Magazin für Leben und Kunst, wirft einen kritischen Blick auf den Rückzieher der Museen. Moderation: Yvi Strüwing detektor.fm/was-wichtig-wird Podcast: detektor.fm/feeds/was-wichtig-wird Apple Podcasts: itun.es/de/9cztbb.c Google Podcasts: goo.gl/cmJioL Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/0UnRK019ItaDoWBQdCaLOt
Í Víðsjá dagsins verður rætt er við Guju Dögg Hauksdóttur arkitekt um sýninguna PREFAB / FORSMÍÐ sem opnaði um liðna helgi í Skaftelli, Menningarmiðstöð Austurlands. Á sýningunni er farið yfir fagurfræði og sögu norsku einingahúsanna sem risu við Seyðisfjörð í byrjun síðustu aldar, auk einingahúss eftir Le Corbusier og norsku arkitektana Rintala Eggertsson. Bók vikunnar að þessu sinni er skáldsagan Beðið eftir barbörunum eftir nóbelskáldið John Maxwell Coetzee. Tveir þýðendur komu að verkinu, þau Sigurlína Davíðsdóttir og Rúnar Helgi Vignisson, og segja þau frá bókinni í Víðsjá dagsins. Snæbjörn Brynjarsson segir frá upplifun sinni af samtímaóperunni Ekkert er sorglegra en manneskjan sem frumsýnd var á dögunum í Tjarnarbíói og er eftir Friðrik Margrétar Guðmundsson og Adolfs Smára Unnarssonar. Ennfremur verður fjallað um umdeilda myndlistarsýningu sem farin er að valda titringi löngu áður en hún er komin upp, en á dögunum bárust fréttir um það sýningu sem átti að fara í fjögur mikilvæg myndlistarsöfn, vestan hafs og austan, hefði verið slegið á frest vegna viðkvæms myndefnis. Við segjum frá listamanninum Philip Guston í þætti dagsins og ræðum við Hallgrím Helgason rithöfund um Guston og verk hans.
Í Víðsjá dagsins verður rætt er við Guju Dögg Hauksdóttur arkitekt um sýninguna PREFAB / FORSMÍÐ sem opnaði um liðna helgi í Skaftelli, Menningarmiðstöð Austurlands. Á sýningunni er farið yfir fagurfræði og sögu norsku einingahúsanna sem risu við Seyðisfjörð í byrjun síðustu aldar, auk einingahúss eftir Le Corbusier og norsku arkitektana Rintala Eggertsson. Bók vikunnar að þessu sinni er skáldsagan Beðið eftir barbörunum eftir nóbelskáldið John Maxwell Coetzee. Tveir þýðendur komu að verkinu, þau Sigurlína Davíðsdóttir og Rúnar Helgi Vignisson, og segja þau frá bókinni í Víðsjá dagsins. Snæbjörn Brynjarsson segir frá upplifun sinni af samtímaóperunni Ekkert er sorglegra en manneskjan sem frumsýnd var á dögunum í Tjarnarbíói og er eftir Friðrik Margrétar Guðmundsson og Adolfs Smára Unnarssonar. Ennfremur verður fjallað um umdeilda myndlistarsýningu sem farin er að valda titringi löngu áður en hún er komin upp, en á dögunum bárust fréttir um það sýningu sem átti að fara í fjögur mikilvæg myndlistarsöfn, vestan hafs og austan, hefði verið slegið á frest vegna viðkvæms myndefnis. Við segjum frá listamanninum Philip Guston í þætti dagsins og ræðum við Hallgrím Helgason rithöfund um Guston og verk hans.
Best known for Maus,his graphic novel about the holocaust, he’s drawn dozens of New Yorker covers, including the black-on-black memorial for the World Trade Center. He is less known for creating Garbage Pail Kids. High Art, low Art? A conversation at the American Academy of Arts and Letters with music from the Wisterians.
This is part 2 of a 2 part episode where we discussed keto myths that could be keeping you stuck from reaching max keto success. Myth #11 - Keto will make you break out since too much greasy fat results in acne Myth #12 - Keto should be a diet high in dairy Myth #13 - Keto causes fatty liver disease Myth #14 - Following a keto diet will turn you into an insomniac Myth #15 - Keto is bad for athletes Myth #16 - Keto causes gallbladder problems Myth #17 - If you no longer have a gallbladder, you should not follow a keto diet Myth #18 - Following a keto diet will lead to an early death Myth #19 - Keto reduces lean muscle mass Links mentioned during episode: Chat the Fat: Episode 9 Kick it Naturally: High Cholesterol Kick it Naturally: Insomnia Dr. Guston’s Podcast Perfect Keto: Pre-Workout Shake Beet Flow, Ox Bile, Milkgest, Digestizyme, - Natural Reference Episode Download: My 10 Favorite Fat Bombs Listener Question: I’m so confused when it comes to saturated fats. I have always been taught they are dangerous, yet a keto diet seems to promote eating saturated fats with excessive amounts of butter and coconut oil. Should I avoid saturated fats? Product Review: Perfect Keto - Pre-workout Drink, Lemon (our affiliate link)
Attorney Debra E. Guston of Guston and Guston has practiced law for 31 years. She practices primarily in the areas of adoption, assisted reproduction, and family formation and protection.She has been a frequent speaker on the topics of adoption and assisted reproduction, marriage equality, and LGBT issues. She comes to this practice as an advocate informed by the AIDS crisis. If you want to hear from a practicing lawyer who finds fulfillment and meaning in her career, listen in.Career Highlights:Immediate Past President of the AAAA https://adoptionart.org/ Co-counsel on an Amicus brief on behalf of pro-marriage equality Clergy to the New Jersey Supreme Court in the landmark decision Lewis v. Harris https://bit.ly/2U7U6Rq Counsel for the Adoptive Parents in the “Baby J” case https://bit.ly/2JyDOxb Bergen County CASA Program Angel Award Recipient Fertility, Insurance, and Advocacy activitiesASRM https://www.asrm.org/topics/topics-index/assisted-reproductive-technologies/RESOLVE https://resolve.org/infertility-101/the-female-body/reproductive-system/Honorable Mention:Don Cofsky Esq. - https://www.209law.com/donald-c-cofsky/Matheu D. Nunn, Esq. - https://www.einhornharris.com/attorneys/matheu-d-nunn/Tune in Today and let us know what you think! If you or anyone you know might be interested in being a guest of The Bold Sidebar – email Tina George: tgeorge@hornlawgroup.net for details. Horn Law Group, LLC 801A Main Street Toms River, NJ 08753 T: 732.736.9300E: tgeorge@hornlawgroup.net Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBoldSidebar/ https://www.facebook.com/hornlawgroupnj/ Debra E. Guston55 Harristown Rd, Glen Rock, NJ 07452T: (201) 447-6660E: deb@gustonlaw.com
Robbin Milne painter’s audio blog about visual art and multi media inspiration.
Part 2 of chapter 3 and conclusion. #artist #memoir #Guston #painter
"I’m in the studio almost every day, and usually begin the day with two to three hours of thinking, almost as if I’m finding or retracing my way back into a painting.." You were recently in a group show called "Part II: The Turning World" Curated by Zavier Ellis at CHARLIE SMITH LONDON. Could you tell us about that show?The show was a three-person show about contemporary landscape painting and included Barry Thompson, Sam Douglas and myself obviously. Zavier Ellis, the Director of Charlie Smith Gallery, came to my studio a while back, just for a nose I think, and I have a vague idea that, although landscape is just one genre I use, (constitutes about a quarter of what I make), the show may have evolved as a result of a conversation we had about a group of landscapes that I had made or that were on the go, something about a tension between a fiction and a realism dichotomy - finding ‘a realism’ through ‘a fiction’. I think Zavier expanded and layered this idea and curated the whole thing, and presented three painters that occupy three very different and distinct positions with regard to landscape painting, and for me, the show did aim to constitute something of a tension between fiction and realism.Could you tell us a bit about yourself? How long have you been a practising artist and where did you study?I studied at Kingston University in the mid eighties and have been painting since then. I’ve also worked as a curator, mainly for independent project spaces, and I have written about painting. I founded Turps Banana with Marcus Harvey in 2005 (although I left three years ago), and I also founded the painting gallery The Lion and Lamb (which closed three years ago). "Part II: The Turning World", CHARLIE SMITH LONDON 2017 The Hand Glider, 2017 The Passage, 2012 'milo's muzzle' 2011 Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?I’m in the studio almost every day, and usually begin the day with two to three hours of thinking, almost as if I’m finding or retracing my way back into a painting or paintings. I usually make a body of work of between twelve to twenty paintings simultaneously. Some paintings might be finished or close to being finished and they will influence or define ideas about other paintings that are in progress, which in turn will suggest new paintings. Some days I’ll paint for seven to eleven hours straight without a break, other days I’ll make drawings or just sit and think for hours – it really depends on the developing consciousness of the work.My studio is at Standpoint Studios in Hoxton, London and I’ve been there for seventeen years. Standpoint, in my opinion, is quite a unique set-up in the sense that it is well run, everyone just gets on with their work, but there is also a lot of humour and friendship. The top sections of my studio walls are covered with drawings that serve the development of ideas for paintings. I have a ‘main’ wall on which I hang the paintings that ‘I’m painting’ and the rest of the paintings that are on the go are hung on other walls as if they are waiting their turn for attention. The scale of paintings varies from twelve inches to six-foot stretchers - in my opinion scale is dictated by content. There are a lot of books in the studio, some on work surfaces, others on the studio floor along with loads of notebooks, sketchbooks of drawings, more drawings and block prints. 'the pot' 2011 'in that large book that overhangs the earth' 2016 'the pragmatic smokeman' 2016 What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?For me, resonance is really about what contributes to and extends your thinking at a given time, and in that sense, I look at a lot of painting from many different periods. More specifically though, in terms of what or who I constantly go back to and think about I’d have to say medieval illuminated manuscript paintings, the northern and southern renaissance painters (particularly Breugel and Titian), Degas, Monet, early Cubism (particularly Braque), the late Andre Derain paintings and some of Guston’s paintings. I did see a Neo Rauch show a while back which I thought was disappointing, and the recent Paul Nash retrospective, which I thought was one of the best shows I’ve seen for a while. With regards to particular works that resonate with me, I have to single out Hunters in the Snow by Breugel, The Death of Acteon by Titian and The Painter’s Family by Andre Derain.Where has your work been headed more recently?I finished a group of fifty-three paintings about eighteen months ago that took me five or six years to complete. Although most of them have been in shows over the years it has been important to me to see the group as an entirety, almost as if that group defines my range and intellectual and emotional structure. My objectification of what that group of paintings is about propelled me into a new group of paintings that feeds off the collapse of a long-term relationship and the death of my dog Milo last year, and they in turn refer, on an abstract level, to thoughts about the content and pictorial significance of Breugel’s Hunters in the Snow. "Part II: The Turning World", CHARLIE SMITH LONDON 2017 "Part II: The Turning World", CHARLIE SMITH LONDON 2017 How do you go about naming your work?Naming paintings is very important to me. I constantly remind myself of a quote from Shakespeare, “and gives to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name”. Objectification is always in play. All the titles of the paintings that were in The Turning World show refer to what is depicted, to ‘ the language of the painting’ and to words that might be used to describe a painting, such as The Passage, The Edge, The Field or The Hand Glider. The Passage emphasizes the light and space in the picture. The ‘painting’ in The Hand Glider implies ‘a gliding’ across the surface of the painting and the picture plane, almost as if the picture is suspended ‘within the surface’.Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?Yes, a solo show in October at Emma Hill’s gallery, and The Eagle Gallery in Clerkenwell, London. charliesmithlondon.comAll images courtesy of the artist and CHARLIE SMITH LONDONInterview published 01/06/17
"My work is very auto-biographical. I’m a loud, exuberant, emotional and probably exhausting character, and my work will always reflect this." Could you tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been a practising artist and where did you study?I left high school and quite quickly the band I was playing with took off, allowing us to play music together for quite a few years. As all of that came to an end I was left with a bit of a hole in my life. Painting and being creative has always been an intrinsic part of growing up in my family household so applying to study painting at a higher level seemed like a good route to go down. I studied Fine Art Painting, BA at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating in 2015. It was a great school, filled with some brilliant tutors and funny people. The fact that I started when I was twenty-four worked in my benefit, I had already spent some time away from home and had already had my social awakening, meaning I was in the studio most of the time. I was also very aware of how great it was to have a studio and resources readily available, and didn’t want to waste any of that time (or money). After completing my degree Stevie (my wife) and I moved to Antwerp for greener and cheaper pastures, painting there for a year after which we then came to be in Suffolk. I’m now soon to be thirty and would say that I’ve been thinking about art as a focus for fifteen years now! You were recently in a group show called "Dumb" Curated by Kristian Day. Could you tell us about that show?It was a great show, filled with heavy hitters. Some painters which I have been looking at and up to for a while so it was an honour to be hanging in there. It happened at Mercer Chance which is a brilliant non-profit in Hoxton, run by artists for artists. The show was called “Dumb” which is a word that one of the the other exhibitors, Paul Housley has been playing with in different connotations in relation to painting. In certain examples the word “dumb” is used to describe base materials such as paint and canvas which need to be activated by the intelligence of the artist. I can get on with this. He’s a good painter who I can identify with in terms of his obvious love of Picasso and Guston. Shit, that Robert Rush painting in the show was a knock-out too! Probably quite an obvious choice for me though. Repo Man, 2017 Bright White Electric Feel, 2016 Pollen, 2017 Your paintings often feature strange/comical figures, could you tell us about these and where your inspiration comes from?My work is very auto-biographical. I’m a loud, exuberant, emotional and probably exhausting character, and my work will always reflect this. Painting has always been a form of self-help for me, or a way to work out any problem solving that life throws up. Funny and sad - sad and funny. After finishing my studies at Wimbledon I watched the movie “Mid-night Cowboy” a bunch of times, Loving everything about it. I started to see parallels between Joe Buck’s (the lead) path and my own - country boy moving to a bright new city (Antwerp), thinking he’s going to crack it, living on a crazy busy street filled with busy, crazy people - soon realising that what was once gold is now dust. I’m a theatrical guy, and really like to throw myself into a role. So once I had made these connections I started to try and live my life as “Joe Buck” as possible. It was all really fun. I’ve put that one to bed after having a solo show which bought together all my ideas and am happy to move on. Right now I’m working on a body of work which is a response and inspired by Drones Club’s new EP. They are old friends of mine so I’m able to talk with them in depth about the ideals that they have in regards to the music they make and what kind of message they want to get across. They are ideas that I’m very much on board with and I’ve found it very rewarding exploring those together with them. We are working on a collaborative show together for the start of June. Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?Stevie and I share a studio at Asylum Studios. It’s set on an old American air base which was abandoned after the Cold War. The old buildings, radio station, bunkers etc. have been filled with a mixture of different and weird businesses. Asylum Studios is where a lot of the police work and intelligence operations happened. In fact, between Stevie’s and mines studio is a partition wall with a one-way mirror window set in. It’s where the Americans would hold their interrogations. In the late eighties there was quite a significant U.F.O sighting - it was our studio where the American air men who saw the U.F.O were bought for questioning. It’s a very atmospheric place, old jet fighter planes are strewn across dis-used runways, radio domes and watch towers spike the horizon. Its very close to our house that we live in on the South East coast. Asylum Studios itself is a co-op run by some brilliant, active and entertaining artists that we now call our friends. Its great to be part of a certain community that makes decisions together and pull each other forward. Having a partner in the same line of work as yourself is such a bonus - Stevie and I both drive each other. There is a constant support net there if ideas are wavering and you don’t have to twist an arm too hard for a crit! Trouble on Turnhoutsebaan, 2016 This House, 2017 Hurricane, 2017 West German Fat Lava, 2016 What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?If you can call The Louisiana in Copenhagen an artwork in itself then that! Just as a building it was beautiful. The lines, the alluring corridors leading to perfectly framed views of the Scandinavian shoreline and the architecture of the gardens. It was incredible. As a museum - just as great. Whilst we were there we caught an ever poignant Louise Bourgeois show - next door, Asger Jorn! But for current resonant work, the John Kröner show at Gallery Bo Bjerggaard that we caught whilst in the city. It was such an excellent example of incorporating the space into the exhibition, right from the windows of the gallery being left open to let the white chiffon curtains billow in the cold, Danish air to raising the floor through the show so it finally meets the ceiling to create the feeling of a wave of doom! The paintings were fresh and a perfect mixture of comic noir, using techniques which I hadn’t thought about before. He is also a painter who I wasn’t previously aware of so it was all the more exciting. Where has your work been headed more recently?I have always had light-play with sculpture, but I think about it more and more. It’s a crazy beast which needs looking at with a whole different eye, which is probably why everything 3-D I’ve made are very much literal reliefs from my paintings. It’s something that I would like to learn more about and be able to use as a vessel for my painting or vice versa.How do you go about naming your work?A lot of the Midnight Cowboy paintings were named after one-liner quotes from the film, sometimes translated into Flemish as I was living in Belgium at the time. There’s a lot of lines in that movie which made me chuckle. This most recent body of work I’m making I have named after the song titles from Drones Club’s EP. My work, is figurative, honest and brutal - the titles should reflect that. Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?I’m working with an artist I really love, Jonathan DeDecker, towards a solo show of mine which will be curated by him in an brand new space in China Town, New York. The show will be large scale works on paper which is something I’ve never done before but I’m up for the challenge and feel comfortable in Jonathan’s hands. I’ve worked with him before and trust him. For me the idea alone of China Town excites me enough. It’s totally romantic. www.thomtrojanowski.comwww.kristianday.co.ukAll images courtesy of the artistInterview published 01/06/17
Humor lays the groundwork for a hard truth and, for poet Tommy Pico, that hard truth is about living as an indigenous person in occupied America. "Alien invasion overlord movies / r cute in a Monet way,” he writes. “I survive seven generations into a post-apocalyptic America / that started 1492. Maybe / you'll live too?" There are, he says, just a few images of Native Americans that have filtered into mainstream culture: the noble savage, the squaw, the horseback warrior, and the sad Indian, “whose religion and spirituality and land and resources and livelihood have been taken away from them. I want to write in defiance of the sad Indian.” Pico's poetry builds a contemporary Native American persona, one that occupies multiple spaces simultaneously: New York City, the internet, pop music, and Grindr. It's an identity that's determined to be heard by the culture at large. Tellingly, Pico's first book, IRL, is both in the form of a single epic text — maybe even a sext — and inspired by Kumeyaay “bird songs,” some of the last surviving remnants of the Kumeyaay tribe's long-form poetry tradition. In this episode, you'll also hear Organist fan fiction from Jimmy Chen, performed by the legendary Edgar Oliver, as well as a series of “verbal selfies” from artist Robyn O'Neil. Feature image of Tommy Pico by Eugene Smith for Poets & Writers Magazine. Robyn O'Neil, "The Everywhere Citadel", 2016. Graphite on paper 60 1/4 x 38 1/4 inches Robyn O'Neil, "Ascension", 2016. Graphite on paper 22 3/4 x 30 inches Robyn O'Neil, "Suffocation Bed", 2013. Graphite on paper 23 x 30 inches Robyn O'Neil, "Inflation Drill (after Guston)", 2016. Graphite on paper 22 3/4 x 30 inches Robyn O'Neil, "The Husband Cathedral", 2016. Graphite on paper 34 1/8 x 60 1/4 inches Robyn O'Neil, "The Mercy Quartet", 2016. Graphite on paper 34 1/8 x 60 inches Robyn O'Neil, "Studies in Suffocation I", 2016. Graphite on paper 60 1/4 x 66 inches Robyn O'Neil, "Studies in Suffocation II", 2016. Graphite on paper 60 1/4 x 66 3/16 inches Robyn O'Neil, "Government Bureau (after Tooker)", 2016. Graphite on paper 22 3/4 x 30 inches Robyn O'Neil, "These Moments", 2016. Graphite on paper 10 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches Robyn O'Neil, "The Five Echoes", 2016. Graphite on paper 15" x 12 1/8 inches Robyn O'Neil, "Ultralight Beam Terzetto", 2016. Graphite on paper 41 1⁄2 x 63 inches
“When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics…and one by one if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting YOU walk out.” Philip Guston Other topics: anger, Toyota Tacomas, apes, coffee, water, John Goodman. And of course, the wonderfully complex Russell Edson.
Curator Peter Benson Miller introduces special exhibition Philip Guston, Roma, on view at The Phillips Collection Feb. 12 through May 15, 2011. Philip Guston, Roma brings together for the first time 39 paintings from Philip Guston's Roma series, produced during his six months as artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1970--71. Saturated in deep pinks and salmons, Guston's cartoon-like pictures evoke numerous aspects of the ancient and modern Roman cityscape and Italian art and culture, from the films of Federico Fellini to the works of both modern and Renaissance Italian artists. The Roma paintings mark a pivotal time in Guston's career. Guston (1913--80), whose abstractions in the 1950s and 1960s won him critical acclaim, was a leading figure in the New York School that included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. By the late 1960s, however, Guston felt abstraction was no longer viable. Profoundly affected by the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and the shift in the art world toward pop art and minimalism, Guston was determined to reinvent storytelling in modern painting. His initial effort at creating this new figurative vocabulary went on view at New York's Marlborough Gallery just weeks before he left for Rome. These new works, with their sophisticated political satire and self-parody painted in a deliberately clumsy style, stunned the artistic community, which neither understood nor accepted them. As a part of La Dolce DC, a citywide celebration of all things Italian in partnership with the embassy of Italy, Philip Guston, Roma presents a crucial period in the life of a modern American artist inspired and shaped by Italian art and culture, not only during his Roman sojourn in 1971, but throughout his life.
Curator Peter Benson Miller introduces special exhibition Philip Guston, Roma, on view at The Phillips Collection Feb. 12 through May 15, 2011. Philip Guston, Roma brings together for the first time 39 paintings from Philip Guston's Roma series, produced during his six months as artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1970--71. Saturated in deep pinks and salmons, Guston's cartoon-like pictures evoke numerous aspects of the ancient and modern Roman cityscape and Italian art and culture, from the films of Federico Fellini to the works of both modern and Renaissance Italian artists. The Roma paintings mark a pivotal time in Guston's career. Guston (1913--80), whose abstractions in the 1950s and 1960s won him critical acclaim, was a leading figure in the New York School that included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. By the late 1960s, however, Guston felt abstraction was no longer viable. Profoundly affected by the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and the shift in the art world toward pop art and minimalism, Guston was determined to reinvent storytelling in modern painting. His initial effort at creating this new figurative vocabulary went on view at New York's Marlborough Gallery just weeks before he left for Rome. These new works, with their sophisticated political satire and self-parody painted in a deliberately clumsy style, stunned the artistic community, which neither understood nor accepted them. As a part of La Dolce DC, a citywide celebration of all things Italian in partnership with the embassy of Italy, Philip Guston, Roma presents a crucial period in the life of a modern American artist inspired and shaped by Italian art and culture, not only during his Roman sojourn in 1971, but throughout his life.
This week: Duncan and Richard talk to artist, professor and musician Jim Lutes about his work, his career, and his recent show at the Renaissance Society."Chicago-based painter Jim Lutes is often considered heir to the Imagist tradition. This, however, is only part of the story. Having come to artistic maturity in the late 1970s, Lutes exemplifies a larger and more complex historical narrative that entails the emergence of figuration and regionalism under the declining influence of Abstract Expressionism. This would be born out over several bodies of work in which Lutes would vacillate beween a populist mode of figuration and a painterly abstraction, the combination of which produced a style along the lines of Picasso in the 1930s or Guston in the 1970s."
Daniel Sarewitz is the director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO) and professor of science and society at Arizona State University. His work focuses on understanding the connections between scientific research and social benefit, and on developing methods and policies to strengthen such connections. His most recent books are Shaping Science and Technology Policy: The Next Generation of Research (with David H. Guston, 2006) and Living with the Genie: Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery (with Alan Lightman and Christina Desser, 2003). Before joining ASU, Sarewitz directed the Geological Society of America’s Institute for Environmental Education and worked on Capitol Hill, first as a congressional science fellow, then as a science consultant to the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He has written numerous articles, speeches, and reports about the relationship between science and social progress, including Prediction: Science, Decision–Making, and the Future of Nature (2000) and Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress (1996), and has done field work in the Philippines, Argentina, and Tajikistan. In 2007, he was named a Templeton Research Fellow, along with Brad Allenby, for their project, “Transhumanism, Nature, and Technology: Reinventing the Enlightenment.”
Daniel Sarewitz is the director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO) and professor of science and society at Arizona State University. His work focuses on understanding the connections between scientific research and social benefit, and on developing methods and policies to strengthen such connections. His most recent books are Shaping Science and Technology Policy: The Next Generation of Research (with David H. Guston, 2006) and Living with the Genie: Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery (with Alan Lightman and Christina Desser, 2003). Before joining ASU, Sarewitz directed the Geological Society of America’s Institute for Environmental Education and worked on Capitol Hill, first as a congressional science fellow, then as a science consultant to the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He has written numerous articles, speeches, and reports about the relationship between science and social progress, including Prediction: Science, Decision–Making, and the Future of Nature (2000) and Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress (1996), and has done field work in the Philippines, Argentina, and Tajikistan. In 2007, he was named a Templeton Research Fellow, along with Brad Allenby, for their project, “Transhumanism, Nature, and Technology: Reinventing the Enlightenment
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