Mike Varley
Travis Kelce, walking New York's streets, Ted Chiang, collective soul
Today’s guest is Mike Varley, an artist, 260-time marathoner, bagel expert, and NYC street curator extraordinaire.
Stat sheet
💼 Occupation: Creator, Facilitator
🏠 Neighborhood: Bushwick East, off the Wilson L or Chauncey J
🌎 Origin: Huntington, New York
💪 Notable work: “2020: Total Clarity” | EverythingisEverything.NYC | Blitmap Artist | Def Crypto Member
🪜 Socials: Twitter, YouTube, Instagram
So how’d you end up here, doing this interview?
I met Kevin at Betaworks in April 2023 during the Art Blocks event Token.Art (editor’s note: organized by none other than Emily Edelman). Subsequently I was invited to the launch party for his NFT project Artist Bingo. Aside from the free space, my bingo card has yet to record a marker.
Let’s check in with where your head is at right now. What tabs do you currently have open on your phone?
A farewell letter to fans from former New York Islander Josh Bailey, who was released by the team this summer.
The homepage of Kaiber, for possible use with video footage from “2020: Total Clarity.”
Absolute Clarity, an experimental EP by friend and artist Ariel Azazel. Not related to “2020: Total Clarity” or “Post Clarity,” to my knowledge.
A recent political call to action by Coinbase.
Preventing PTSD with Tetris.
A website for books that teach programming to babies.
Troubleshooting fan issues for a Dell Laptop.
Website for the bread & pastry subscription service Wildgrain, whose co-founder I met at a Baukunst mixer.
A replacement ramekin for a charcuterie board acquired last year in a game of Dirty Santa.
Amazon page for a Philip K. Dick short story anthology.
At the time of request, I had 27 tabs open on my phone, most of them reddit threads. I refuse to download their app and any time you open a thread on mobile browsing from their front page it opens in a new tab. Any time I get to approximately 30 tabs I cull it down to ten, every 2 days or so.
How about the Platonic form of Mike—what people, places, or activities make you feel most yourself?
Walking around New York City. Conversing with people pursuing new ideas, honing old crafts or performing mundane tasks I’m unfamiliar with.
What do you do in your spare time?
The past three and a half years of my life have been largely self-governed, making spare and unspared time difficult to parse. I play video games as much to review them or keep up on professional trends as I do for leisure, and when I do it’s mostly scheduled out between other projects. The most recent game was Baldur's Gate 3, which I stopped early after 50 hours as it was simply too immersive to complete casually.
The only streaming service my wife Jessi and I are subscribed to is HBO Plus/Max/Etc. We’ve been working our way through their catalog of prestige shows, but again with some degree of intent. It took us about 5 months to complete The Sopranos. I finally watched season one of True Detective this week while working on a mixed media project. Both were excellent for different reasons.
What makes you forget about checking your phone?
Good conversation, excessive drinking, urgent health issues, video editing, heated arguments, epiphanies.
Wind it back. What’s your favorite memory from the past year?
Traveling through Europe for two weeks with 9 adult friends and 1 baby friend to celebrate our mutual friend’s wedding.
Now fast forward. What are you most looking forward to in the next month?
In two weeks, Jessi and I will travel to Detroit for a weekend to visit friends that were married this year. We were abroad at the other wedding during their big day and have intended to see them ever since.
Time to get weird. What’s the weirdest thing you believe?
My personal afterlife narrative is that on death, our self falls away and we rejoin the collective soul, which is less a repository of memories and experiences and more akin to the sensation of inspiration and excitement one feels at the brink of revelation.
Back to normie questions. What’s your dream job?
International Unidentified Billionaire Philanthropist.
What work of yours are you most proud of?
This is a near impossible question. I’ll forgo any of the creative stuff and say the thirteen years I worked as a Recreation Therapist at a nursing home, as that’s probably the biggest net impact I’ll ever make from a karmic perspective.
What are two goals, one personal and one professional, that you have for the next year? For your lifetime?
My personal and professional goals are the same for this year: complete the “2020: Total Clarity” documentation effort “Post Clarity.” Of the five planned parts, three editions are out in the wild: Everything Is Everything, Weed Bags of New York and Lost Pets of New York. The two remaining pieces of documentation are Series Four “Still//Life” and Series Five “The Community is Endless.”
My lifetime personal goal is to enjoy the stewardship of my body more than I feel burdened by the task. My professional lifetime goal remains International Unidentified Billionaire Philanthropist.
Last few questions, focused on mapping your socio-creative world. Who are your creative inspirations?
It’s hard to give any lifelong inspirational North Star. Recently I revisited Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life and Others, which prompted me to pick up his second collection Exhalation. I can’t recommend them enough.
How about among people you know or are friends with?
So many people in this space. I’ll limit it to everyone that graciously agreed to lead a discussion at this year’s Def Con: JamieW, O_Excess, Sethfork, Shahruz, Grumbly, Manny, CJ & Jon, Devon Dolan, IsIain, Whale_Drop, Matto, Totally & the Sup Team and Lydian Stater. Really anyone involved with Def Crypto is constantly impressing me.
What creative scenes or movements are you most excited about right now?
How off-trend is it to say NFTs? Whenever we settle on the rebrand, I’ll be happy to switch terminology.
As someone that’s explored many mediums in pursuit of personal articulation - film, music, performance, games, writing, and so on - what I’ve gained in rounded experience I’ve lost in building an easily traceable oeuvre.
With NFTs, there’s a pathway for me to continue my practice of utilizing whatever medium feels most urgent while now having a common documentation vessel that’s easy to point back to for others to experience.
If you could have a sleepover with anyone in the world, who would it be?
Besides my wife, Odell Beckham Jr.
Send the last pic in your camera roll, no context.
Meow! Okay, who should we have on next?
There are easily dozens of people who I’d refer to the project. My number one person is someone who absolutely needs an NFT anime trading card: @mannynotfound.
Mike’s List
Five recs for right now
🎬 Memorex by SmashTV, a long time favorite and a huge inspiration for my last experimental feature, National Lampoon’s GLOBAL STAYCATION
🎤 “Friday” by Sir Charles Jones
📚 “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” by Ted Chiang. From the short story collection Exhalation.
🏈 Travis Kelce Week 7 Highlight Reel. Recently popularized by his romantic ties to Taylor Swift, Kelce is a football savant. What makes most of these plays notable is how utterly mundane they appear. It’s almost as though he and quarterback Patrick Mahomes are playing catch in the backyard and not exposing every flaw in a highly sophisticated defensive scheme. Kelce essentially does not run routes, but studies the defense in advance of a game, recognizes coverage in real time, and sits himself in a position he knows will be neglected. Then Mahomes can decide if he wants to use him as a cheap source of yards or execute on the play they were planning in advance. In this game, the Mahomes/Kelce pair saw their consecutive completions reach 29 straight passes. This is the longest such streak between quarterback and tight end since tracking of this nature began in 1991.
📍 Big Rock Beach, College Point, Queens
Want more? Go follow Mike at the links above. To collect Mike's trading card, find him IRL and ask to scan.