Hello Friends,
It’s been a second. I’m writing you from deep inside an undisclosed location in the hills where I’ve blown the dust off the great old content machine, filled it with that special putrid fuel, and lit it up, shocked that it turned over once more.
It feels good to watch it sputter to life once again and slowly push out that sweet sweet content.
For the better part of the last year, I’ve been heads down working in my new role at Gear Patrol. It’s been rewarding and welcome after a rough bit during the pandemic when I thought I might finally be done with all things media and all things content.
Nay, I am not.
I’m writing to re-introduce this newsletter, which is now focused on what I’m focused on (this is a good baseline requirement for newsletters: to have the writer be generally focused and interested in the material at hand).
Some brief backstory: As you may remember this newsletter was born out of the Hand & Eye, the website I started back in 2014. Some of you have been along for the ride since then. Thank you! The initial mission was to cover creatives and makers and find some inspiration from them. I did it for years. I used the site to briefly open an e-commerce shop, make documentary films, do some content strategy consulting, and I moved to Milan, published a swimming newspaper, explored NFT photography, and a whole lot of other things.
The Hand & Eye was really about covering people who made physical things. I thought this was the most interesting pursuit at the time and I romanticized the creative work and dreamed of doing it myself, but I never did.
Instead, I kept making content with my fingers and a keyboard and a camera. Aside from the blog and newsletter, I contributed to the New York Times, Fast Company, The Atlantic, Hodinkee and now Gear Patrol. I used to write articles and now I mostly help brands come up with advertising programs. So that’s what I’m going to be writing about here: Media and content. It’s what I know best.
This has been my world for the last twenty years, something I’ve been reminded of while digging through a box my mother kept in her garage. In it were old newspaper clippings, magazines and tapes of interviews I did with people like Taj Mahal. It’s been a real trip rummaging through my past and rediscovering my own story, which I plan to draw off of to inform this newsletter going forward.
I’ll focus on media and content that interests me and excites me, no matter the format. This will be a place to celebrate the makers of good journalism and good creative work and we’ll keep the name as is. So let’s get to it.
This week in good work:
Oatly: Will it Swap
This is work from some friends and former colleagues, but even if I didn’t know them, I’d share it. The conceit is food people testing out Oatly (oat milk) to see if they can swap it in for their usual dairy ingredients in their recipes. But the videos are really these beautiful little vignettes of colorful characters. The production value is insane and the tone is pitch perfect. More episodes on the Oatly Youtube.
Gear Patrol Studios: Tissot
Ok here’s the thing, I’m going to share work I worked on as well because this is my newsletter and I’m proud of the work! This is work Gear Patrol Studios did for Tissot and I think it’s great. I can’t take credit for the film or photos, that’s the work of our incredible production team and partners, but essentially we took this watch for an epic run in the Eastern Sierras of California. It was there amid the surreal landscape, we brought this project to life. See the whole program and watch the video here.
New York Times Op-Docs: I Sold the French Laundry
Never eaten there. Didn’t know the backstory. Loved every second of this profile of Sally Schmitt, the original founder of The French Laundry.
That’s it. More soon.
John
Good stuff John, glad to see this newsletter coming back. Keep creating!