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Just Motes: L.A. Sunsets, Barncore, Yamamoto, Anarchism
Jasper Nighthawk
November 12, 2025
Dear Reader,
The most valuable thing I got from freshman comp was this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” I’m regularly discovering myself to be dead wrong about one thing or another—a fact here, an opinion there, and let’s not even talk about my predictions. So I love how Emerson transforms this into a virtue. Call it openmindedness, call it epistemic humility, just don’t call me to task for changing course when the situation warrants.
Which is probably too highfalutin a wind-up for the announcement that I’ll be publishing this newsletter on Wednesday mornings now, and I’m going to aim once more to publish every week, and sometimes—today, for instance—it will be just motes, with no central essay.
But enough of that. Back to the things that matter: don’t you just love “the hobgoblin of small minds”?
Thanks as always for reading.
– Jasper
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It’s silly, but I think part of why I’m drawn to live in LA is that sunsets like this—
—remind me of the original cover of Gravity’s Rainbow—
—which I never actually even owned (my copy during high school was the one with a blueprint (that is to say a cyanotype) of a V-2 rocket on the cover), but at some point I saw a picture of the original dust jacket online, and I always thought about it and how I wanted to live in that vibe. I know, I know, the artist meant to evoke an old-world European skyline and a WWII-era bloody sunset, but who cares what they meant to evoke! I found it here in LA.
This reminds me that the last time I wrote rapturously about the quality of the light in L.A. was a blog post titled “Meditation, David Lynch, L.A.” that I published on January 5 of this year. Two days later, wildfires began buring through the city. Dozens died and over 200,000 people evacuated, including both us and David Lynch. He died a handful of days later, his precarious health tipped into crisis by the emergency move. The whole thing messed me up for a long while.
I hope I’m not jinxing anything by writing about that L.A. light again.
How do you chill out in these fallen days? My own algorithm occasionally serves up things like “Abandoned 100 Year Old Workshop Renovation - 2 Year Timelapse.“ Good stuff, actually. The English accent is great. And it’s of extra interest to me because in a past life I myself spent about two years rehabbing a hundred-year-old barn and workshop. But if you stick around to the end of the video, this last little bit is wild:
Unfortunately, the owner of this building has gone completely quiet, which is a bit of a challenge. I’ve been trying and failing to get in touch, to agree to the next stage of work, so that I can get the workshop into a useful state. When he resurfaces, I’ll pick things up where I left off. Just in case he doesn’t re-appear, I’ve started looking for a workshop to buy, and I’ve found some amazing options, including buildings nearly 300 years old. While all this goes on in the background, I’m going right back to basics. I’ll be heading into the woods to prepare for an attempt to cross the Irish Sea in a DIY Stone Age boat made entirely from animal skins and wood. Along the way, I’ll be making everything I need from scratch: buckskin clothes, flint tools, weapons, food, and finally the boat itself. On to the next adventure.
All these content creators are nuts. You did that, on a volunteer basis??? You’re also a Stone Age LARPer? (For myself, I have to confess that I actually enjoy doing projects without a camera pointed at myself the whole time.)
Lifelong Giants fan here, but oh my goodness, Yoshinobu Yamamoto can pitch. Who didn’t come away from the World Series in love with that guy? If you, too, found yourself amazed, don’t miss the ESPN story about his trainer, Osamu Yada. Yada’s method seems to basically embrace tropes about East v. West, flexibility v. strength, kung fu v. boxing.
“There are things that are natural in nature, and then there are things that are normal in the sports world,” Yada said. “And what I've been able to do is teach Yoshinobu about things that occur in the natural world. And because the general philosophies and the things that are accepted are so different when you look at it from a sporting sense, it seems like something that's outrageous.”
I’d love to read a New Yorker treatment of this figure, giving him a bit more skepticism and context. But the ESPN article is great fun. (One thing was off, though: no mention of iconic skinny pitcher Tim Lincecum! Criminal not to mention The Freak.)
Here’s Gary Schteyngart on “The Rise of the Inflatable Chicken Resistance” (via Austin Kleon):
Frivolity and absurdity are kryptonite to authoritarians who project the stern-father archetype to their followers. Once the pants are lowered and the undies of the despot are glimpsed, there is no point of return…. What is happening to us is as serious as a guillotine. We must harness our best creative, humorous and frivolous selves in order to keep it from falling.
It won’t surprise you to know that I’m inclined to agree. But I take seriously the way that this approach seems precisely upside down to many “serious people,” especially those embedded in liberal institutions. A PhD-holding colleague told me the other day that they think the No Kings protests aren’t leading anywhere because they saw a row of people in inflatable costumes posing for pictures. I’m not saying these protests are the cat’s meow or anything, but I also would point out that relying on liberal institutions and high-minded, serious people to save us is an approach that has been failing us for decades now.
On the topic of what actually leads to political change towards more freedom and justice for non-elites, I love this passage from James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism:
As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have convincingly shown for the Great Depression in the United States, protests by unemployed and workers in the 1930s, and the civil rights movement, what success the movements enjoyed was at their most disruptive, most confrontational, least organized, and least hierarchical. It was the effort to stem the contagion of a spreading, noninstitutionalized challenge to the existing order that prompted concessions. There were no leaders to negotiate a deal with, no one who could promise to get people off the streets in return for concessions. Mass defiance, precisely because it threatens the institutional order, gives rise to organizations that try to channel that defiance into the flow of normal politics, where it can be contained. (xviii)
Don’t hold your breath waiting for someone embedded in government to disrupt the status quo. That’s what protest movements are for.
The latest from Animation Obsessive, “The 'Toy Story' You Remember,” seems potentially abstract and technical: it’s about how in the early days of digital animation, films still had to be transferred onto 35mm prints to be distributed to theaters, which perversely means that the currently available digital prints of these movies (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, The Lion King, Aladdin) are showing different colors than the original release. But the side-by-side comparisons are truly shocking.
(That’s the 35mm Aladdin print on top and the current streaming version below.)
As a child of the ’90s, these films are canon. It’s crazy to realize how much they’ve changed.
If you have some leftover pie, why not cut it up into big chunks and eat it with your hands?
I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?