Category: Art

Penelope Trunk told me about an amazing website Miranda July created for her book.

It starts like this:

and keeps:

going:

I clicked through at least 20 “pages” of her site. I never do that. I’m a skimmer. I browse through a site and skim for the stuff I think I want, then perhaps bookmark it and never go back.

There is something (visceral | curious | engaging) about seeing someone’s handwriting and dirty dishes right next to each other.

I’ll admit, I’m a judger. Visiting someone’s website, I want to nitpick it. I want to find the outdated portions and secretly judge people deep down for not having an amazing proofreading staff. AH HA! You forgot to spell Guns n Roses correctly! Ha!

Actually, that isn’t true. I don’t want artists and writers to have a proofreader. I want them. I want to engage with another human being and learn about them. I want to see their silly imperfect handwritten letters and be reminded I’m imperfect and interesting. You should see my wife’s cursive lower-case letter ‘a’. It is adorable. When she writes an ‘a’, it looks like Jigglypuff ate too much and decided to go to sleep in a coma of cuteness. I mistake her letter a for o. ALL. THE. TIME. And it is adorable and human. Her letters remind me that I am adorable and human and slowly gaining weight like Jigglepuff. (JP, if you are reading this: lay off the puffs, puff.)

I want to see their silly imperfect handwritten letters and be reminded I’m imperfect and interesting.

I’m excited. I think we need more Web Brutalism. We need more top-of-the-fridge whiteboards websites. We need more people being people- softer, rounder, real-er people.