Daniel Brown
I remember vividly when and how I met Daniel.
It was 2021, a gloomy but humid Saturday in October. I had just moved into my apartment in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood, and was waiting for Amazon to deliver my new mattress. When the two delivery guys arrived, they dropped off the mattress in the building lobby, which was by all means an undesirable situation for someone like me, a guy who lives on the top floor and who would rather do six hours of burpees than fifteen minutes of weight-lifting.
So, I made an offer: I would give the guys a generous tip if they took the mattress up to my apartment. The stockier and cockier of the two, who looked like a goofier version of Sylvester Stallone, ecstatically puffed out his chest when I mentioned what my offer was.
“This thing?!” he sneered, looking at the seven foot-tall package. “Bro, I got you. Let me do it.”
Ignoring his buddy, the Sylvester-Stallone guy started pushing, kicking, sliding, and rolling the package up the stairs. The other delivery guy followed behind, saying “careful, careful,” every few seconds. I led the way, feeling utterly useless, directing where to turn as if the two flights of stairs were an unsolvable maze.
Just as we were about to conquer the second floor, I noticed someone, presumably a neighbor, coming down the stairs. In that exact moment, the Sylvester-Stallone guy, while carrying the weight of the package on his chest and walking backward, gave in to gravity and fell on his back. Shortly thereafter, the package fell on him.
I stood frozen. “Gotta be careful,” the other delivery guy noted, shaking his head. The presumed neighbor, a guy dressed in head-to-toe black and wearing striking black-rimmed glasses, walked up to the box and pointed to the big, bright red letters printed on the package. ‘Two-person lift required,’ the letters read.
“Says here,” the presumed neighbor said to the Sylvester-Stallone guy in deadpan, British accent, “two-person lift required.”
The Sylvester-Stallone guy laughed it off, got back up on his feet, and continued with the Sisyphean job. I turned to the neighbor.
“Denis,” I said and shook his hand. “New neighbor, apartment ten.”
“Dan,” he replied. “Apartment nine.”
After running into and chatting with Dan a few more times over the course of the next month, I became intrigued. We were the same age, we shared many interests, and his sense of humor was brilliantly on point; one night, when I was loudly assembling furniture in my living room, he texted: “Churning butter over there?”. That’s a potential friend, I thought, so invited him to come over one night for decaf coffee and tiramisu.
I was proud of the setup in my new apartment, especially of the gallery walls I had assembled in the hallway and in the living room. Custom prints of my favorite magazine shoots were on the wall: Till Lindemann for Zoo Magazine, Rosalía for The Fader, Kristen McMenamy and Nadja Auermann wearing grunge for Vogue. They were accompanied by prints of favorite music album covers, from Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster to St. Vincent’s Masseduction, and of stellar promotional photoshoots, from Grace Jones and Amy Winehouse to The Knife and GusGus. And, if friends came over for a visit, I most certainly enjoyed telling them about my unprecedentedly atypical, eclectic curation of art on the wall.
The night Dan came over, I turned on the lights in my hallway so that the gallery wall could be admired in its entirety. At 7:30 p.m., Dan entered my apartment and immediately inspected the wall with probing diligence. He was silent for a bit and then raised his finger and pointed at the photo of Róisín Murphy for her promotional photoshoot of “You Know Me Better.”
“That’s Róisín,” he said assuredly.
Then he scanned the other photos. “Robyn. Rosalía,” he continued, “oh, love this photo of Rosalía.” Next, he pointed to the St. Vincent’s Masseduction album cover. “That’s the St. Vincent album? This one was fine,” he added, “but I really did not like the album before this one.” His gaze then got stuck on the photo of Karin Dreijer and Olof Dreijer. “Oh, this is the, um,” he said and then briefly paused, “The Knife. Right.” He identified a few more and reached the end of the gallery wall.
“Okay,” he concluded casually. “It’s, like, alt electronic. I get the vibe.”
My vanity was deflated. But the coffee-and-tiramisu project was successful: Dan and I became friends. A year and a half later, right after he moved from Lower Haight to his new place in The Mission, I thought the transition would be the perfect time to add another thing to his plate, so I asked if he would agree to be profiled for the magazine. When he said yes, what I did not expect was that we would start our interview right next to the beach.
At 1 p.m. on yet again a gloomy Saturday, I meet Dan at Hook Fish, a seafood eatery in the Outer Sunset neighborhood. There, I quickly connect the dots that I should not be surprised by this choice. One, we are going to be eating fish and chips, a meal that could not be more English. Two, Dan grew up surrounded by the sea, on the Isle of Portland in Dorset county, a land-tied island in the English Channel.
I mention to him that one of my favorite YouTube videos is that of Florence Pugh doing a classy mukbang for Vogue, in which she shares the secret to a good fish and chips.
“You know,” I tell Dan confidently, “she explained how her grandad would take his own piece of fish to the chippery.”
Dan cracks up.
“Chippy,” he enunciates laughingly, “not chippery!”
Dan enjoyed his early childhood. He remembers driving around Dorset with his mom, who always listened to dance music in the car. That’s how Dan was introduced to Céline Dion, George Michael, and Pet Shop Boys. His dad was into music as well, and introduced Dan to Garbage and Alanis Morisette. He also got along well with his brothers. Plus, growing up on the isle was neat. Cliffs, rolling hills, lighthouses, and seagulls: they all added a dash of maritime magic for a kid like Dan. He tells me Thomas Hardy grew up in Dorset as well.
“What?” I ask, all starry-eyed. “Did you ever see him around?”
From Dan’s baffled facial expression, I can tell he is not thinking of Tom Hardy, the actor.
“Thomas Hardy,” he chuckles, “the Victorian author.”
When Dan was nine, his family moved to Liverpool and then, a few years later, to Suffolk. Though Dan wasn’t gaga about Liverpool specifically, moving around from place to place didn’t affect him much. Largely because he had other issues to deal with, most notably his health. When he was fifteen, Dan’s right lung collapsed—three consecutive times, to be specific—and he had to get surgery after the third time. He recalls being high on morphine and thinking Amy Winehouse was in his hospital room, playing the piano.
“It wasn’t all that bad though,” he says, and finishes his portion of fish and chips. “Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds had just come out and my brother James brought me the CD.”
His left lung soon collapsed as well. It was all okay eventually, but it meant that Dan was sick for a good portion of his adolescence. To get through that period, he found solace in academics, spending most of his time studying. He says that, in a way, being focused on schoolwork helped him take his mind off the stress surrounding his sickness. An interesting parallel, I think to myself, because Dan is now a managing producer at Apple, where he leads high-pressure, high-stakes initiatives, and is known for his conscientious, strong work ethic.
“Right, it probably became a coping mechanism,” I add. “Do you think that’s why you put so much of yourself into work today?”
He stares at me, astonished, for a few seconds and doesn’t say anything. He then grabs his phone.
“Okay, this is a breakthrough,” he says. “I need to note down to talk to my therapist about this.”
After Hook Fish, we head over to General Store on Judah Street, one of Dan’s favorite artisanal stores in the city, but we don’t stay there for too long because he needs coffee and I need dessert. We hop over to Damnfine Coffee, a petite coffee shop next door, and sit there for a bit; Dan drinking his iced black coffee, and I eating my donut and drinking my iced coffee with a splash of milk.
“So, what happened then?” I ask.
“I went back to Liverpool for uni,” he says. “I was at University of Liverpool. Studied English and History, but dropped History in the last year. I grew up a ton during uni.”
“You mean, like, through losing innocence and all that?”
“No,” Dan answers firmly. “I think it was more about becoming more worldly. After spending so much time sick and sheltered, I just wasn’t street-smart enough. My friend Becky, who is a bit older than me, will often say this about me, that I was very much a baby when she met me in uni. She took me under her wing and was like a big sister to me back then.”
It’s surprising to hear that, because the Dan I know is both cultured and shrewd, which goes to show how much he had changed since then. It was during university too that Dan started defining his distinct sensibility. The English-and-History side of him cherished the elevated narrative and sentimentality of the Victorian era, but the other side of him—I’ll call it the worldly-street-smart side—also loved the unfiltered realness of the life that was unfolding around him.
He was particularly fascinated by American culture during his studies. He spent much of his time researching the late 20th-century art of New York and reading seminal works of authors like James Baldwin, who depicted the socioeconomic realities of people living in modern cities. It all culminated in his dissertation, written only after his friend Becky encouraged him to expand an initial essay he had written.
The dissertation analyzed acts of transgression in different works of art, drawing comparisons across literature, from Lolita to Tender is the Knight, and cinema, like A Single Man, and even pop icons, like Madonna. I write this down in my notebook and scribble a bunch of exclamation points, because this project sounds like the genesis of present-day Dan’s uncanny ability to observe the subtlest patterns and then describe them with sublime clarity. It’s his trademark personality trait that I greatly admire.
In our friendship, it often comes through in texting, when we start arguing about music, film, or celebrities. After only two years of knowing me, he can accurately predict what I will or will not like, and almost always has a punchy one-liner that succinctly encapsulates my taste.
There are many good examples, like the time he dropped “these women don’t move you, you like an underdog” after I did a circular soliloquy about liking Kylie Minogue but not understanding the hype over Taylor Swift or J.Lo. Other good ones are “all of your girls need to be DEEP in the club or on an Icelandic glacier,” or the “this stuff is straight-down-the middle denis music to me” when he asserted I would love Charli XCX’s songs “anthems” and “visions” (his prediction was accurate).
And, in the rare event my taste does throw off his internal machine learning model, like the time I texted him saying Beyoncé’s house-heavy Renaissance was overrated or the time I said Dune and Glass Onion and Spencer were all bad movies, his comebacks are equally memorable: “I do not understand you,” or, by far my favorite, the all-caps “WRONG.”
But it also comes through Dan’s way of being. Through his soul. To recognize the subtlest patterns in the world requires a delicate, innate sensibility, one that is not marred by practicality or cynicism. On the surface, there is certainly Britishness to Dan—the dry wit, the realism, the guardedness—but, upon closer look, his gentleness and idealism become remarkably apparent. I am reminded of it when we go for a long stroll through the Golden Gate Park and pass by the Bison Paddock, where the air suddenly becomes unbearably humid and where it quickly becomes clear to both of us that we need a break.
“Can we sit for a bit?” Dan asks. “I’m wilting like a flower.”
We sit on a bench and watch the bison lumber across the vast green fields. We talk about the cultural differences between the UK and the US and how the two cultures are more different than one would think. I mention that one of my initial observations, after moving to the US, was that air conditioning and heating were used too often in households. To this day, if my living room gets warm, I first open all the windows or maybe I retreat to the bedroom, where it’s cooler. And, if it’s cold in the morning, I wrap myself in blankets and make plenty of hot coffee. It’s only when the temperature becomes unbearable that I go for air conditioning or heating. Dan then makes a connection that I had never thought about before.
“Right, that in itself can be a measure of how much you value individuality,” he adds. “In your case, you try to see your life with your stuff and your living space as a symbiosis. You want to learn to live with the stuff and with the nature around you, and to adjust to the world. But if you value individuality alone, you can sometimes force the environment to adjust to you. You don’t retreat to your bedroom; you immediately turn on the AC. You don’t pull out the blankets or wear winter clothes; you simply crank up the heating.”
We hang out on the bench for a bit longer, and then buy Cokes and grab a Lyft to Dan’s apartment in The Mission. I want to see Dan’s new place and say hi to Mowgli, Dan’s adorable, friendly cat who often used to pop over to my apartment to investigate the empty suitcases and boxes that inhabited the bizarre planet of under-the-bed space.
When we get to Dan’s place, two striking photographs, one of Leonardo DiCaprio and one of Madonna, immediately grab my attention. Which means we have to spend some time talking about film and music. I ask Dan what his favorite movies are, and he opens the Letterboxd app on his phone to identify the contenders for the list. While searching, he mentions that his ex-boyfriend concisely described Dan’s favorite movies as “highly-stylized movies where seemingly not much happens.”
“That’s Spencer!” I squeal. “Absolutely nothing happens in that movie.”
“I vehemently disagree with that,” Dan replies assuredly, and proceeds to declare the winners.
Ordered in alphabetical order of the film’s name, Dan’s favorite movies are:
A Single Man (2009), directed by Tom Ford
An Education (2009), directed by Lone Scherfig
Atonement (2007), directed by Joe Wright
Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky
Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott
Billy Elliot (2000), directed by Stephen Daldry
Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee
Call Me By Your Name (2017), directed by Luca Guadagnino
Closer (2004), directed by Mike Nichols
Donnie Darko (2001), directed by Richard Kelly
El Laberinto del Fauno (2006), directed by Guillermo del Toro
The English Patient (1996), directed by Anthony Minghella
The Favourite (2018), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
God's Own Country (2017), directed by Francis Lee
The Great Beauty (2013), directed by Paolo Sorrentino
The Hours (2002), directed by Stephen Daldry
I Am Love (2009), directed by Luca Guadagnino
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), directed by Quentin Tarantino
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), directed by Quentin Tarantino
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), directed by Peter Jackson
Moulin Rouge! (2001), directed by Baz Luhrmann
The Neon Demon (2016), directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Notting Hill (1999), directed by Roger Michell
The Phantom Thread (2017), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Romeo + Juliet (1996), directed by Baz Luhrmann
Shame (2011), directed by Steve McQueen
Spencer (2021), directed by Pablo Larraín
The Virgin Suicides (1999), directed by Sofia Coppola
Later on, when writing Dan’s profile and going through our texts, I stumble upon a thread in which we outlined the lists of our favorite albums. I pull the list of Dan’s twenty nine favorite albums, which, per Dan’s explicit all-caps footnote in iMessage on June 12, 2022, is not the official list of all his favorite albums, but is still a good draft with many of his favorites. Ordered in alphabetical order of the artist’s name—and marked with the dagger † character if the album was also on my list—the twenty nine albums from Dan’s list are:
Air — The Virgin Suicides (Soundtrack) (2000)
Alanis Morissette — Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Amy Winehouse — Back to Black (2006) †
Ariana Grande — thank u, next (2019) †
Beyoncé — Renaissance (2022)
Billie Eilish — Happier Than Ever (2021)
Florence + The Machine — Ceremonials (2011) †
Garbage — Garbage (1995)
Goldfrapp — Black Cherry (2003)
Goldfrapp — Seventh Tree (2008)
Goldfrapp — Supernature (2005)
Jessie Ware — Tough Love (2014)
Justin Timberlake — FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006)
Kara Jackson — Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? (2023)
Kacey Musgraves — Golden Hour (2018)
Kanye West — Yeezus (2013)
Lana Del Rey — Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019)
La Roux — Trouble in Paradise (2014)
Lily Allen — It's Not Me, It's You (2009) †
Lorde — Melodrama (2017) †
Madonna — Ray of Light (1998)
Marina and the Diamonds — FROOT (2015)
Robyn — Honey (2018) †
Rosalía — El Mal Querer (2018)
Sufjan Stevens — Carrie and Lowell (2015)
Taylor Swift — Folklore (2020)
The Weeknd — House of Balloons (2011)
Various Artists — A Single Man: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2009)
Various Artists — Call Me By Your Name: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2017)
Three months after our oceanic date, this time on a sunny Saturday in December, Dan and I meet up again. We are grabbing coffee and pastries in The Mission and will then go to Alamo Drafthouse Cinema to watch Saltburn. Both of us are gearing up for the holidays and are visibly excited to get a break from work. Dan especially; he leaves for the UK tomorrow afternoon to spend time with his family.
Because our conversations often revolve around arts and culture, it has taken me some time to piece together the evolution of Dan’s professional life. This is partly because I did not know what a producer in tech hardware actually did, but also because I kept wondering why Dan was not in a creative field, where he could express his sensibility and find opportunities to cultivate his aesthetic eye. Once I did connect the dots, however, the story suddenly made sense.
After university, Dan moved back to Suffolk for a brief period of time and worked in public relations. He then spent the next six years in London, working at advertising agencies as a project manager. I often ask Dan to tell me more about his early twenties in London—mostly because I keep wondering what the life of an alternate-universe, twenty-three-year-old Denis who lived in London might have looked like—but all that I can typically extract from Dan is some variation of “very fun, lots of parties, long hours” or “loved it, but I like to close a chapter, and I was ready to move on.”
Through his job at AKQA, a design and innovation company, Dan ended up moving to San Francisco and getting a job at Apple as a producer. In a nutshell, producers at Apple are the folks responsible for guiding and managing the end-to-end development of Apple’s products and services. But that actually entails a wide range of responsibilities, from project management and relationship management to in-depth research and creative solutioning.
Domain-specific knowledge around the product is often paramount, and so is the ability to understand, translate, and simplify the cross-functional lingo of all the different teams working on the product. In other words, it’s an excellent fit for someone with an extreme attention to detail, a natural predisposition for efficiency, a high degree of conscientiousness, and a passion for collaborating with others to make great experiences. In other words, it’s actually the right job for Dan. And he loves it.
“Why hardware, though?” I ask on our way to Tartine Manufactory, where Dan wants to stop by Heath Ceramics and the Heath Newsstand. “Wouldn’t it be easier with software?”
“I like hardware,” he replies. “I like the physicality of it. I like the texture. There is beauty to the product. I personally never got that by looking at a piece of software.”
“So, is it fair to say that a core tenet of your job is making experiences elegant for the millions of people who buy Apple products?”
“That's definitely a part of it,” he says. “Delivering the best end-to-end experience for a customer.”
These days, Dan is becoming increasingly interested in climate change and climate tech. He isn’t yet sure where this interest will take him in the future, but I am sure that, whatever it is, it will be a domain perfectly suited to his attentiveness and aesthetic. I feel confident in my prediction with this one because, at Heath Newsstand, I finally get to be the accurate predictive model in our friendship when I spot a thick pink book titled Sofia Coppola Archives and show it to Dan. He is elated and buys it.
We make our way over to Alamo Drafthouse and spend the next two hours watching Saltburn. This time, amazingly, we have nothing to discuss: we both feel the same about the movie. Good watch, but not groundbreaking. We go our separate ways, we both log the movie in our Letterboxd catalogs, and we both give it three out of five stars, the perfectly average score.
”That was a fun Saturday morning,” I later text Dan.
”Yes,” he replies, “it was lush.”
