Vanities – Abnormal Capitalist

The Skyward Earth: Restoring Ma Yansong’s Topography of Play

It began with a quiet transaction in a park. Surrounded by the very nature that inspired its form, I acquired the pieces of Ma Yansong’s Floating Earth from a private seller. At that moment, it was just a dismantled puzzle of wood and stainless steel, slightly weathered and forgotten. As the artist himself wrote of the piece, the earth often fades from sight, and seems not to exist. Yet she persists.

Taking it home that night, the restoration began. It was only then, sitting with the scattered pieces, that I discovered a striking fact: its creator, Ma Yansong, is the visionary architect behind the monumental Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Suddenly, this domestic object carried the DNA of a titanic cultural institution. There is a distinct, almost meditative intimacy in cleaning an object of design with such provenance. Wiping away the dust from the organic wooden tiers, polishing the reflective gleam back into the cold steel, I began carefully twisting the central rod back into its axis. With every turn of this single stem, a new stratum locked into place. I wasn’t just fixing a tray; I was erecting a topography. As Ma envisioned, each rising layer became a tower storey, an unscripted space full of kinetic potential.

“By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.” — Proverbs 24:3-4

Through the simple, mechanical act of assembly, the object reclaimed its purpose as a foundation for the home and the city—a rare and beautiful treasure in itself. But while the tray physically grounds our domestic space, its conceptual soul is constantly pulling upward. It refuses to be just a heavy, static base. This tension between being rooted and wanting to rise is beautifully captured by Ma Yansong himself. In the poem accompanying the piece, he shifts the perspective entirely away from the structures we arrogantly build upon the ground, revealing instead the earth’s own independent longing: There is nothing without the earth and yet the earth is not here for us – she can leave anytime. It is the blue sky that she loves.

This inherent desire for upward movement—this yearning for the blue sky—mirrors one of the most profound architectural and emotional feats in modern storytelling: Pixar’s Up.

Carl Fredricksen doesn’t just travel; he transforms his static, grounded home into a floating vessel. He achieves elevation to escape the weight of his grief, but the journey quickly becomes a profound search for beauty. This search is perfectly encapsulated by the literal pursuit of the film’s “sacred animal”: Kevin, the magnificent, iridescent, mythical snipe.

Kevin is an absurdity of nature, a creature of pure, vibrant chaos. She represents unadulterated beauty and the untamed wonders of a world that adults so often forget how to see. The pursuit of this sacred animal is not driven by utility or logic, but by pure wonder. It is the exact same sense of wonder required to look at a wooden dining tray and envision a floating metropolis longing for the sky.

To truly appreciate Floating Earth or to understand the balloon-lifted architecture of Up, we must reconnect with the concept of the playful. We have to awaken the child that lives within each of us—the inner Russell, who looks at an unscripted space not as a void, but as an adventure waiting to happen.

“And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.'” — Matthew 18:3

There is a divine truth in playfulness. The rigid, adult mind builds square, gray boxes that weigh heavily on the ground, arrogant in the assumption that the earth is merely here for us. The childlike mind understands that creation should be joyful, kinetic, and elevated.

Now, fully restored and standing tall on its central axis, the Floating Earth sits in my home. It is a piece of true abnormal capital: an asset that yields no financial dividend, but pays out daily in aesthetics, philosophical reflection, and the quiet reminder that while we are rooted in the still, same earth, we must never stop looking up at the blue sky she loves.

→ mad

Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich

“Why did you do it?” Tennenbaum stammered.

Without an impressive degree or two, Epstein said, “I knew nobody would give me a chance.”

This resonated with Tennenbaum. He had benefited from his own share of second chances over the years. And so he agreed to give Epstein one as well.

It was perhaps the first example of Epstein getting caught cheating — and then avoiding punishment thanks to his uncanny ability to take advantage of those in positions of power. This would become a lifelong pattern, one that largely explains Epstein’s remarkable success at amassing wealth and, eventually, orchestrating a vast sex-trafficking operation.

→ The New York Times

40 Years Later: Sade, “Promise”

But then, wrapped around the constant hum of this existing tension, is an album that isn’t necessarily about love, or even about surrender, but about giving your heart over, repeatedly, and enduring the failures that come with the exchange.

• • •

Time has stopped, and the world where loss has taken on a new and different shape has to begin. The song ends on a fade-out, a repetition that grows smaller, and smaller, and then gone. This revelation, too, isn’t for you, even if you need to hear it. Even if you need the reminder that it’s still worth running after the possibility of love. It’s still worth imagining that someone could love you. They may love you and later leave you. They may love you and then die, or you may die. You may hold their hands in a gray and unromantic hospital room, and then they’ll be gone. But at least, for a little while, you had hands for reaching, and hands that reached back.

→ Longreads

The $40-Million Elbow

Brett Ratner for Vogue Hommes International, 2005

Wynn turned around again. He put his pinkie in the hole and observed that a flap of canvas had been pushed back. He told his guests, “Well, I’m glad I did it and not you.” He said that he’d have to call Cohen and William Acquavella, his dealer in New York, to tell them that the deal was off. Then he resumed talking about his paintings, almost, but not quite, as though he hadn’t just delivered what one of the guests would later call, in an impromptu stab at actuarial math, a “forty-million-dollar elbow.”

A few hours later, they all met for dinner, and Wynn was in a cheerful mood. “My feeling was, It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.” Mary Boies ordered a six-litre bottle of Bordeaux, and when it was empty she had everyone sign the label, to commemorate the calamitous afternoon. Wynn signed it “Mary, it’s all about scale—Steve.” Everyone had agreed to take what one participant called a “vow of silence.”

And a similar story on fixing a Monet on Hyperallergic.

→ The New Yorker

The Gospel of Jodeci

Perverse? Yes. Blasphemous? Maybe. But not irreconcilable. To contemplate the meaning of Jodeci is to grasp at the intersection of religion and excess, of devotion and abandon, of agape and eros—a space where holiness and hedonism coincide. Sacred and erotic poetry, after all, are not dichotomous, but rather the most intimate and ancient of bedfellows, from Sufi mysticism to Ovidian elegy. The meme may be “If the Love Doesn’t Feel Like ’90s R&B I Don’t Want It,” but literary history knows that Jodeci’s ars amatoria continues a millennia-old poetic program that welds the object of affection to something of the divine, a slippage between the beloved and the god, which the poet-scholar L. Lamar Wilson describes as “sacrilegion,” a never-ending hunger for the unattainable object of erotic perfection.

→ Oxford American