Justin's Block

I painted this 4 inch wooden block for my friend Justin. All the designs are from Islamic sacred geometry except for one, derived from my experiments with small canvases. Acrylic.

It's a gift for Justin's 49th birthday. I was 49 when I met Justin and he was 19. I spent my 49th birthday in an African nightclub in Tokyo. Dancing with a sunflower at one point. That night, the band put down their instruments and physically escorted every person in the nightclub to the dance floor.

In 1994, I left Whole Earth, which had a lot of soul but ran out of money, and became the founding executive editor of Hotwired, Wired Magazine's pioneering "webzine," as we called it in the olden days -- which had plenty of money but, it turned out, a soul problem. . One of my crew noticed that a Swarthmore sophomore was getting more traffic to his webserver than Wired was (he had porn links), so we invited him to intern while we readied Hotwired for launch. He joined us for the first time at a Thai restaurant and seated himself next to me. I asked him what brought him across the country, and he said: "The opportunity to work with you." I wondered whether he was being sincere or a smartass. Eventually I realized that he was/is both. 

This is what I thought a multimedia webzine should look like in the summer of 1994:

Justin and I were on one side of a dispute that eventually fractured the Hotwired staff. The publisher saw himself as the arbiter of whatever web culture was to become -- in the mode of Hugh Hefner, Jann Wenner, etc. We on the other side of the argument saw Hotwired as a platform for community and what later became known as "user generated content." The publisher won that argument and Justin and I and a few others quit. The story was  told by Gary Wolf in his book Wired: A Romance. 

In 1996, when I launched Electric Minds, a webzine that offered social media and user-generated content -- ten years too early -- Justin took a leave from Swarthmore and moved in with me and my wife and daughter.

We have had adventures all over. Copenhagen, Stockholm, and here we are in Tokyo, circa 2000.

Atop Mt Tamalpais