Hi Sublime it's me Alex

welcome to the Hips Don't Lie party

Hi - I'm Alex, Sublime’s new head of creative.

A big chunk of my time will be spent creating cool stuff for you in this newsletter, so I wanted to introduce myself and share some of the ideas I’m hoping to explore. 

But first…

Alex x Sublime: an origin story 

Sari (Sublime’s founder) and I went to college together.

She was part of the cool kid crew while I was more or less an idiot.

I searched my email for our first exchange and found this:

 2008! A simpler time. Taylor Swift had just released “Love Story” and now look at her - in a real life love story with the football player guy.

Given that my dance style is often described as "that man's hips are without a doubt lying," I did not attend the event.

After college, we existed in one another’s peripheries - Sari would support my Kickstarter campaigns and I would say ‘thank you so much.’  I spent a decade working at tech startups while moonlighting in comedy, film, and improv until, in 2022, I started writing Both Are True, a twice-a-weekish newsletter where I explore my background (immigrant from Ukraine, Jewish, loottttaa mental health stuff) and how it affects the person I am today (father, artist, just a lil guy). I share my shame, analyze my anxiety, and try to understand it all through the language I feel most comfortable with: comedy.

I also spent that decade burrowing deeper into the rabbit hole of… internet thinker people? I don’t know what to call it, but you know what I’m talking about - cool people doing cool stuff online.

And lo and behold, there was Sari, a big deal in the internet thinker cinematic universe! I read all her work and was blown away, so I messaged her on Twitter to tell her as much. She then responded and said she was a big fan of my writing on BAT.

And so our collab meet-cute began.  

edit: here’s the piece Sari is referencing: i think my son hates me

What you can expect

Sari and I will be writing this newsletter together. Big picture, the goal remains the same - to share with you the ideas and people that make us go ‘whoa.’

Sari’s already got the whole philosophical musings + hope for a more human internet + prose that resonates without being cheesy thing down.  

I hope to add a few things - laughter, calm chaos, and a best effort attempt at honesty. 

laughter

I’ve been doing improv comedy for the last twelve years. Over that time I’ve realized there are at least two types of laughter you hear from the audience. One is a response to something clever or smart, like ‘ha ha I see what you did there, very nice.’ It’s a shallow sort of laugh and one that comes mainly from the mind. 

The other - my favorite - is a deep, guttural sort of laugh that feels like it’s coming from something deep within. This is a laugh of recognition that comes from seeing something on stage that the audience did not know they would relate to as much as they did. It is the laughter of being seen, and there are few things better.

I hope to bring some of that second type to Sublime. 

calm chaos

My friend has a theory that there are two types of people - chaos muppets and order muppets. I am a chaos muppet who believes that if he only had the right organizational system for all his thoughts, he'd become an order muppet. But I'm not. I am chaos. This, I’m learning, is okay!

The chaos of the internet is where I feel most home.

Let’s leave order and logic to the machines - they’re better at it than we are anyways. What they’ll never pull off is the weird, the silly, the nonsensical, the - wait for it - sublime. And if they do, that stuff will stop being weird and we’ll do something else weird instead. 

tbh

Two compliments I often receive about BAT are:
a) the comments section feels like a party and,
b) things feel genuine, honest, real. 

I want to bring that energy to the existing party that Sari and the Sublime team have been putting on here for the last few years. 

Think of it as a “Hips Don’t Lie” party, but for the soul. 

And like the word meander, it starts with me.

So I’ll start and just…be honest for a minute. 

a few things I’m thinking about 

1. I really want to do a good job. From the outside, Sublime felt waaaay too cool for me. I worried they’d all think I was some dumb comedy idiot guy. But from the inside I realize that they’re all idiots too! We all are. Time and time again I relearn that my fears of not belonging are just that - fears. In truth, most people in most communities are kind, warm, and welcoming to those that want to be there.
    

2. I just became a dad. Again. 2x dad over here. From everything I’d heard, two kids is way harder than one. Not two times as hard either. 100x. Yowza. That hasn’t really been the case yet. Our little girl is only two weeks old though so she’s just getting started. I'm nervous about balancing everything because I'm an all-in kind of guy who sucks when it comes to time management, so balancing my two kids - Sublime and BAT - on top of two actual kids is gonna be...interesting.
   

3. But I'm not that worried about it. This is the first job I've had where I have felt like I can fully be myself. With past jobs, I felt like I had two families that couldn't know about each other - my make money job and my creative pursuits. With Sublime, I was hired because of my creative pursuits. That's so cool it blows my mind.  

Stay tuned for more details on our vision for the newsletter in the weeks to come.

For now, and I can’t stress this enough, please make sure your hips do not lie at any point that’s our one rule.

Say hi?

I would love to meet you here in the comments. If you’ve got a minute, please reply and say hello. Here are a few questions you can answer if you’d like:

1. Who you are and what you’re into these days?

2. What you most dig about this newsletter already?

3. Any questions you have for me or Sari or the Sublime team?

4. Do you think I should have attended the hips don’t lie party?