The woman serving us at Hills of Herat, an Afghani restaurant with two locations (I drove to the wrong one first) asked us if we were a band? Are we roadies for a band? Yes, everyone laughed, we’re something like roadies. It would have been too complicated to tell her. But anyone with a vested interest in mainstream pop culture has likely seen what we were getting up to. All the videos have reached the meme pages.

A good question I saw on the internet, recently: Do whales ever travel so far into the depths of the ocean that they drown, unable to surface before taking a breath?

My friend CJ often said his favorite dreams were of swimming with whales. I’ve never, despite trying, been able to find one. Most of my dreams occur on land. I have tried to dive deep, gradually overcoming the bodily reflex to gasp. There is some comfort in the quiet beneath the ocean, or within the relatively calm confines of a lake. My brain still screams.

I did see a majestic flank rise over the ocean once, color of labradorite—was it that vessel that contains the largest heart, the largest brain of all the singing animals?

Recent research published in Nature explores an extensive “whale fell” off the Australian coast, about 7,000m deep. The research notes that there are over 700 individuals per square kilometer: a graveyard as historic as Père Lachaise, or the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.

This trench contains a curiously dense collection of whale remains, which have drifted down to the ocean floor and become food for a myriad species of sea stars, bone boring worms, and other strange creatures that establish colonies along the broken bodies of the Earth’s grandest, cleaning and decomposing the skeletons. The trench has existed for millions of years, and so among the skulls are those of extinct species. There is a suggestion of “accidental mortality”—that extraordinary depth of the trench presents a curiosity to certain whales, who venture deeper and deeper into the crushing blackness in search of something, and that they become lost, or perhaps transfixed by their surroundings, and fail to return to the surface in time to fill their lungs, which are the size of industrial AC units, and can inhale thousands of liters of air.

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Midnight on the clock face. The new world struggles to be born.

“So will this new world be the product of two lovers, nestled in revery? Or is this some deeper manifestation…a thing that begets itself, that chooses, from a vantage of both future and past, to arrive, like a dormant insect, when it deems the conditions right? If the end of the world is one second away from occurring, then all should be well, right? Because in order for time to run, first it has to cross half the distance between the onset and the end, and then it has cross half the distance between the second half distance, and then half the distance of……”

After a long day of fantasy and distraction, the philosopher shut himself in his study to commit to paper a question: when exactly does something happen?

During the day, the philosopher dreamed of cheating on his wife with one of his students, many years his junior, many standard deviations his intellectual inferior, many synapses short of a fully-developed adult brain, all inequities he would be willing to overlook should this student express a passion equal to his own. Let them meet in the middle. Let the samaras of love waft across the room and tickle the hairs in my pink swelling heart, he would think. The philosopher did not know when something was going to happen, but he did understand that with patience and alertness one may notice something happening, and respond accordingly.

Other people, he thought, often made decisions for you. They do this entirely on their own. All you have to do, he thought, watching a flock of pigeons alight from the rooftop on the other side of the park in front of his office window, is stand in front of the door. Eventually, the door will open on its own. Then you walk through.

▷

Cƒ- and I went to the Brooklyn Museum to see Christian Marclay’s new film, Doors. I had anticipated this event, in some way. I knew it would happen—that I would sit down in a dark room and once again acquaint myself with this great artist, whose face, history, and preferred media I knew so little about—just that I would be there. I didn’t know when, or where.

I knew that I would someday see Doors because I enjoyed The Clock, Marclay’s previous film, which I simply stumbled upon one day in London, in 2018. The Clock is something truly massive—a masterpiece, you could even say—and it is unusual to me, especially in an age like today, that something so encompassing would appear to me out of nowhere. It was as if I had wandered into an unknown neighborhood, taking on chance an alleyway that passed right beside the road to which I was accustomed, and this alley led me into some new sector of a city I thought I knew well, to a place for which I had no precedence, either in photographs, or posts or anecdotes or rumor, and then just as I turned a corner into an open square, I see an airplane. Voilà!

Maybe it feels unusual to be surprised because our world is so captured by the hubris of certainty.

There are no undiscovered mysteries, we are continually reminded. We just roll downhill, collecting speed as we approach a ramp cantilevered over naked, empty space.

So maybe in order to understand something new about this kyanized corpse of a world, we could blow it wide open, taking thousands of individual slice.

Marclay encouraged me to think outside of time and events, which together are perceptibly intractable (like our philosopher, I see what I want to happen, what is happening, and what has happened, but never more beyond the scenarios and strategies I can put to paper) but through art the experience of time, within which exists our physical theater of continual change, may be suspended and held up, like a glass globe with a swirl of floating dust contained within, whose individual surfaces can be inspected for substance and meaning.

My Question is:

How many pieces of time do we need in order to determine that something has happened?

In his new novel, Transcriptions, Ben Lerner gestures to the most discrete unit of experience, of events concerning time and occurrence, our Philosopher’s Measurement Problem, which is the paradox of how quantum events can exist in a state of superposition, yet are instantly resolved upon observation:

“Yes. No one ever leaves a theater. A black box theater. Like the black box of an airplane. That is recovered. Like Schrödinger. The superposition of theaters…or like the cave artists of Patagonia, who, nine thousand years ago, blew pigment from their mouths, creating a halo effect around the hands they held against the wall of their cave. When the black box is opened in one universe, a dead cat is revealed. In the other universe…”

The speaker, Thomas, whom we understand to be a renowned intellectual in his 90s, trails off here. It should be understood that Thomas and the narrator are engaged in play. They are, in fact, discussing a stage play, a play within the play of the novel, in reference to which the narrator has presented a curious image of quantum entanglement, namely the notion that he is “still there”, in the theater, watching the play in some “other universe”, as if to imply that the world of Transcription is not continuous, in the sense that events and happening layer on top of one another, like soil, with the past lost to memory. Rather, there is the suggestion that all events—all of that which has happened before and now and will happen soon or thereafter—play out continually in separate bubbles of time, and if one possessed some divine ability to pierce the veil of perception, they may walk back into that dark theater they visited decades previous, and see the play happening, the crowd in their seats exactly as they once were, and their younger self, rapt with attention, failing to notice their older self standing in the wing.

Of course in our reality, when you pierce a bubble, it pops.

Neither Thomas nor the narrator are physicists by profession, so we understand that their intellectual reparté is primarily one of language: they are exchanging mimetic concepts—symbolic constellations, thinks the Pattern Seeking Brain—and this conversation occurs less so they can “get to the bottom” of something than to ease the two characters back onto a shared gravity. They are two fallen leaves, and they must settle onto moving water, so they may traverse this river of time in sync.

Transcription has much more to say about families than it does about the measurement of time and causality (at this point, though, it seems like these things are inseparable, doesn’t it?). But the novel’s invocation of “black boxes”, these tools of data collection and measure to which we have no access, draws us into the discrete world of the measurement problem, where scientists have been working diligently over a century to render time to its most base unit, first for the purpose of global synchronization, and then to achieve higher orders of sync, at atomic intervals that occur far below our realm of perception.

To understand the intervals of time, I had to travel back to Edinburgh, to try and meet my past self.

00:00:00.00000000

image: National Institute of Standards and Technology

In the past, the synchronization of clock time was not a “problem.” We used the sun.

Of course, there might have been some instance where, say, a premodern man was expected to be home by a certain time, and wasn’t, and this was an issue within his household because it had been happening quite a bit lately, this lack of consideration, and his excuse, that he was coming from far away towards the East, and because Earth is curved the evening occurs later relative to his home, this excuse was considered unsubstantial, either because the household didn’t believe in the curvature of the Earth, or they couldn’t come to terms with relativity, or they simply didn’t care, because they had slowly come to suspect that (based on a variety of intuitive and sensory signals) the premodern man had in fact been very close by the whole time, and was simply spending his afternoons at another household, and lying about it.

In this hypothetical case, it is probably important that the premodern man and his household establish more honest communication strategies, rather than say, inventing a way to “synchronize” clocks.

And specifically, what we mean by synchronize is the invention of a new form of time that may persist in tandem to solar time, with both instruments tracking orbital paths like toy cars on a track, occasionally meeting up, but often slightly ahead or behind one another.

In the beginning of the 19th century, clocks were indeed synced to local sundials, meaning individual towns were in some cases minutes apart from one another. It was the introduction of “railway time” that provided the impetus for broadening the zones within which the hands of the clock remain the same. By increasing the speed of travel (i.e decreasing the duration of travel) humans created conditions which drove us to collapse barriers of longitudinal division.

Away from localities that directly observe the sun and use mechanical means to subdivide this observation, towards longitudinal “timezones” that synchronize the entire globe and appeal to globalized institutions such as banks, airlines, and telecom providers over individuals—enter the global headache that is Daylights Savings Time. Some people hate it! Governments still argue about it.

All this is to say, efforts to “synchronize” will likely incur some discrete loss of local temporality. Our bodies react to losing time in the sense that there is some noticeable discomfort experienced. We were once entirely circadian animals.

The many time “zones” of Australia

The road towards abstracted atomic measurements of time begins with the Scottish Enlightenment genius, James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell graduated from the University of Edinburgh, where there is a building dedicated to his name, hidden beside the Braid, a nestled chasm of creeks and forests in the shadow of Blackford Hill. He went on to Cambridge in 1850, King’s College in 1860, and continued to study until an early death at 48. Maxwell sits beside Newton and Einstein as a physicist of incredible prowess. Much of our contemporary world is built on top of his discoveries. Below is the first example of color photography, produced by Thomas Sutton in 1861, based on instructions given to him by Maxwell.

Maxwell was the first to suggest syncing a clock to the vibration of light waves. Adapting and improving upon his principle, today we use a Cesium atom, which ticks at

9,000,000,000 vibrations per second.

Cesium is a soft metal, and melts close to room temperature. Every Cesium atom has the same vibration, no matter where they are on Earth, and this is the jittering slave to which almost every satellite-connected device on Earth receives its time. The pursuit of increasingly fine subdivisions of the second continues, at a laboratory high up on a plateau in Boulder, Colorado. Here, scientists experiment with increasingly arcane, unstable elements such as the rare earth mineral Yttrium, to achieve frequency rates of up to 10^-18.

00:00:00

00:00:00:00

Let’s try to establish what exactly what events we aim to measure.

After all, a film does not play in seconds. It has individual frames, advanced at speed to create the illusion of movement. Film is an expensive medium. The cinematic convention of 24fps was established in the 1920s, as it was found to be a minimum sequence of still images that could achieve veritable smooth movement. This established standard remains a convention in the same way the length of the album of music was standardized at 35-45 minutes (again, a decision made by record companies based on calculations of economy and practicality). It is indelibly associated with the art form in itself. Recent digital attempts to produce movies at higher frame rates are often rejected by the audience as appearing uncanny. Controversially, television manufacturers introduced a feature called “motion smoothing”, which artificially upped the frame rate of displayed media. This decision caused widespread confusion and discomfort—in some ways, a sense of vertigo—and the intent behind the decision was so poorly communicated that Tom Cruise, the patron saint of movies, voluntarily delivered a PSA explaining how you could turn the feature off.

24fps is not the frame rate at which the human eye perceives movement. The eye and the brain work in collaboration to reconstruct images, sometimes referred to as “moments”, likely also adhering to a biological economization of energy use. It has been proposed that human typically perceive 30-60fps but can, in moments of crisis, detect and process up to 200fps. There is some notion of hard physical limits playing a role here. Smaller animals are understood to perceive “moments” at a much faster rate than humans in part because their brains are physically closer to their eyes. This in part explains their vastly superior coordination: dogs catch balls, mice scurry, dragonflies zip over still water, and houseflies effortlessly evade a rolled-up issue of the New Yorker.

Consider the energy constraint. Why are our brains not always tuned to such a fast frequency? Like watching the uncanny smoothness of a high frame rate film, experiencing reality with such detail can be nauseating. Think of that feeling when time “slows down”, perhaps as a glass of water is knocked off the counter, the body reacting reflexively to rescue it; or the moment before a bicycle collides with a moving car, where certain death is avoided in a quick reaction that seems to have arisen with the slowness of a yawn. The brain understands that too much detail is a hindrance.

(photo: The Tate)

24:00:000000000000000000 (hours)

I first saw Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” in 2018, at the new extension of the Tate Modern, in London. It was the end of one world, and the beginning of another.

London was a construction site, as it has maybe always been: the ghostly mussel and clam tones of wet stone architecture contrasted by bright orange and red, cones and signage demarcating work zones, the imperial blue of scaffolding, the lightning yellow of hi-vis equipment finalizing this capitalist empire in awesome, uncanny surfaces of the glass cubes that seemed to grow like mushrooms, the cubes encasing the city in a sort of zoo enclosure. London’s transparent embrace of global wealth solidified in steel and glass, and the dream of London gave way to the foggy morning commute from Archgate, where Douglas Adams and Karl Marx are buried, to midday, wandering into shadowy museums displaying skulls and shrunken specimens in jars, the giant open surface of Audobon’s handpainted birds, and the drunken suits in the dark afternoon hobbling home through Soho after a meal of £4 pints (this was considered flagrantly expensive at the time) and gulps of hot air.

Here is the gist: The Clock is physically a clock. It is a sequence of moving images comprising 24 hours. It is stored inside a hardware computer as opposed to, say, a 35mm reel. The moving images are synced to an external measure of time, thus this piece of media has none of the navigational functions of linear storytelling formats like novels, VHS cassettes, and DVDs.

With MIDI, a digital music protocol that allows for synchronous tempo, the device that adheres strictly to the count of another is referred to as the “slave”. The Clock is an object that is a slave.

Debuted at the White Cube in 2008, all of the viewing rooms for The Clock are always the same. There are rows of Ikea couches and walls of black felt. Since most museums keep daytime hours, much of the film will remain a mystery to much of the public. The strange hours of after midnight are the most deeply enticing, and therefore the most inaccessible.

In 2018, I saw 10:00AM-1:00PM. I talked about the experience to anyone who would listen. Later in the week, I took my friend Danny, and we sat for 6:30PM-9:00PM. In 2025, when the film showed at MoMa, I saw 2:00PM-5:00PM. In total, about the half the time someone is typically awake on any given day.

The filmmaker Chantal Ackerman once boldly remarked that by viewing her film she was, in practical terms, stealing from you “two hours of your life”. Can the vampiric atrophy of “watching”—and it’s undeniable that since so much of our time is spent in front of screens, we are both blissfully ignorant and deeply self conscious of how and what we watch—be alleviated by consuming all of cinema at once? Time spent watching The Clock reminds us of how we, as economic and biological units, are beholden to time. This is a decision we make.

During the experience of this essay, I returned to Ben Lerner’s 10:04, a novel that I had at some point begun and abandoned, evidenced by the bookmark from Novel, a bookseller in Memphis, Tennessee, indicating I had purchased it likely four or five years ago. Armed with greater distance and context, I found that Lerner’s preoccupation with the vertigo of time suffuses 10:04, and I was confronted with an uncanny sense that I had sublimated the novel’s contents without being fully aware of it.

10:04 is titled after a scene from Back to the Future. This reference sits deeply nested inside of a speech within a speech that is itself suggested to be a temporal projection of the author-narrator. In one crucial scene, the narrator meets a friend in order to to discuss their ongoing concerns of Millennial adulthood, while also trying to watch as much of Marclay’s The Clock as possible during the film’s first run at MoMa (winter 2013). The narrator of 10:04’s experience of the film is remarkably similar to my own, including the fact that he arbitrarily chooses to leave at an exact hour mark. Could it be that I read Lerner’s novel before seeing Marclay’s film, and my own viewing experience somehow scrubbed off some autofictive residue from the collective memoriplasm I share with this award-winning offer?

At one point during the screening, the narrator checks the “time” by glancing at his phone. The absurdity of this tic brings him out of the moment:

“I’d heard The Clock described as the ultimate collapse of fictional time into real time, a work designed to obliterate the distance between art and life, fantasy and reality. But part of why I looked at my phone was because that distance hadn’t been collapsed for me at all; while the duration of a real minute and The Clock’s minute were mathematically indistinguishable, they were nevertheless minutes from different worlds.”

In his novel Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald (whom Lerner indicates as a significant influence, going as far as adopting Sebald’s stylistic convention of printing low-res images throughout his novels) notices the monument we build to industrial time, channeling his lamentation of some loss of innocence through the eponymous narrator:

“a mighty clock, the dominating feature of the buffet, with a hand some six feet long traveling round a dial which had once been gilded, but was now blackened by railway soot and tobacco smoke. During the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of that hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s heart almost stopped.”

According to Austerlitz, a wandering intellectual when the narrator meets him, whose travels bring him closer to confronting the terrible secret history of his family, and their fate at the hands of the nazis:

“…all travelers had to look up at the clock and were obliged to adjust their activities to its demands. In fact, said Austerlitz, until the railway timetables were synchronized the clocks of Lille and Liège did not keep the same time as the clocks of Ghent and Antwerp, and not until they were all standardized around the middle of the nineteenth century did time truly reign supreme. It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other…”

Austerlitz never wears a watch, he claims, calling it…

“a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time…in the hope…that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so…”

One would be so lucky to have a friend of such pretensions. Again and again, it would seem that Ben Lerner’s protagonists exhibit similar ambitions: to circumvent the passage of time, to subvert the exhausting waves of fashion, the gigantic yaw of the political pendulum, all of these ruts in the surface of spacetime that we often discover ourselves to be bound to like mules on a millstone.

10:04PM

In a podcast interview with Art Report (2018), Marclay points out that The Clock is a history of London’s video rental stores (all of which have since closed) where the artist and his team farmed the clips to construct this massive assembly of 20th Century cinema. Marclay played no part in this enormous indexing project; his time was entirely spent editing, to the point that he developed various physical frailties common of office workers and compulsive computer users. His chosen medium has always been the readymade, for which he identifies Marcel Duchamp as a key point of inspiration.

Within this rush of information, we understand the patterns of our day-to-day, but also the patterns of our society. Unitary time is an essential variable in basic economic calculations: productivity, efficiency, speed (measures of economic output) are rates, meaning they are mathematically represented as quantities using time as the denominator. Because of this, so much of Marclay’s clock observes a cinema depicting industrial work. We are in the city where numbers are crunched, deals cuts, and heists planned; the Wild West, where the clock denotes the hour of mortal confrontation, depicts the history of fringe towns set up to support frontier workers and entrepreneurs in overalls; even the world of the uberwealthy, familiar to us all now as cloistered and openly flagrant, makes an occasional appearance when some underling or captured secret agent is drawn into a messianic throne rooms aboard a yacht.

The Clock lasts forever and passes too quickly. We see that so much of our time is in fact compressed between the first and last 15 minutes of an hour, as a deadline approaches, or a meeting must be rushed to, or a bomb must be diffused before it blows up a bank, skyscraper, planet, etc.

We see the agitation of 3:00PM and 4:00PM, when the working animal has long exhausted any capacity for rapid insight, and communication withers as the group animal cobbles together their remaining collective brain cells. At 5PM, quittin’ time in the Western World (or at least, the world of long 20th Century Cinema, which precedes our more present hairy reality of unstructured digital work evening), there is a sudden euphoria: it’s time for happy hour! The tellers window comes down, the open sign flips over, and the streets outside become swollen rivers.

So much of cinematic time is tied to the chase. Something the hero desperately seeks is just around the corner, waiting for them. In the nick of time. Before time’s up.

In our cultural understanding of time, something must always be done “before”—before the hour turns over and the nature of the world itself transforms, because it is understood that one minute is not the same as the one before it, and that what is lost to time can never be reclaimed.

Marclay’s film is ultimately a cinematic history of work and industry. There is of course a history of cinema that disregards industry entirely, where mythic tales are told, and free spirits run their fingers through golden, pastoral fields, but none of this is essential to the story depicted in The Clock, because clocks are the masters of work.

Gandalf will never appear in any of the thousands of clips assembled by Marclay’s team because Gandalf, like Austerlitz, never wears a watch. A wizard, after all, arrives exactly when he intends to.

How Do We Know We are Having an Experience?

Contrary to the discrete sanctity suggested by our date system, there is discussion as to when, exactly, the 20th century “ended”. As one era flows into the next, some things serve as definite markers, such as the mass adoption of new technology, or shifts in political power. Some suggest that global catastrophes define our times, as they traumatize the citizenry, who turn away from archaic philosophies and make room for radical reinvention, assisted by new methods of communication and media.

The term “long century” was first proposed by historians to cover a period from 1789 to 1914, beginning with the French Revolution and ending with World War I. The idea being that there is a symbolic century, containing The proposed “long 20th century”, covered in Giovanni Arrighi’s book, projects an end date for this current era as the inevitable erosion US global hegemony, assisted by globalized finance, the centralization of wealth in a small, powerful elite, and the declining hegemony of American culture ceding influence to the East.

Many historians have proposed discrete dates by which we may discern a transition from the century of American hegemony into the new world we inhabit today: the rise of TikTok and AI, for instance, or perhaps earlier, on September 11th, 2001, a deep wound that jettisoned the future, miring American identity in a feedback loop of anxious suspicion, where we increasingly came to see friends as enemies, and citizens as aliens. Others suggest the election of Barrack Obama, which began as some symbolic promise of transcending racial and political boundaries, and ended with a deep sense of pessimism within the American political system, as it became clear that even the most erudite and visionary leader of our era could become handicapped by politics.

It is this long 20th Century that I believe Marclay depicts on screen in The Clock. We see hope and despair in the span of minutes, as familiar faces age and change, heroes and villains come back from the dead, and above the baroque vestige of our rich civilization, time reigns supreme. It is fitting, then, that cinema seems to have died along with the 20th Century.

Films continue to be made, but the experience of watching a video has become poisoned by the smartphone, with its tiny screen and incessant advertisements, the short form video battering the viewer with obscene images, many of them having no origin in any reality we could call our own.

A New Door Opens

At the Brooklyn Museum, Marclay’s new work, Doors, is in some ways a sequal to The Clock. At least superficially, it exhibits a similar construction: a sequence taken from a large archive of films, which play without narration or explanation, allowing the viewer to become lost in history.

Both due to the its subject matter and the media environment into which it has been unleashed, the experience of watching Doors is profoundly different.

Doors exclusively depicts the moment in which someone passes through a threshold. Here we have a doom scroll of monomania: open the door, walk through, close the door, repeat. This ordinary behavior is magnified to the point of semantic satiation; we are forced to consider what exactly a “door” serves to separate. In the film, it is not just two rooms. Worlds exist beyond doors, as to decisions. Life and death hang in the balance.

Notably, the film is edited for spatial continuity. When someone opens a door outwards the next shot (often a completely different person) will the door closing from the same angle and in the same direction. In the language of filmmaking, this editing convention conserves continuity; it’s one of many generally accepted principles within the “grammar” of filmmaking, along with the 30% rule, the “rule of thirds”, etc. We are dealing with a composition that embraces certain traditional filmmaking constraints in order to take broader liberties with respect to narrative. It is therefore a film of pure movement.

Doors suggests a world in which there is no time, and also, crucially, nothing ever happens. There are many similarities to The Clock, in terms of what the film teaches us about storytelling. Like time, doors often impede or enable crucial moments of plot, humor, and interaction between individuals. There are, of course, many many chase sequences, where a screaming woman evades an unseen pursuer. Cops run after robbers, spy chases spy, a well-dressed man on holiday is not who he may seem….

Sound travels between dimensions and universes as well, creating the eerie sensation that there is in fact one single protagonist of the film, and this shapeshifting entity is caught in a strange liminal hell, where they flit through the world like a quantum paradox, never arriving anywhere or resolving any conflict.

Diverging from a well-defined structure, Doors play out in a similar fashion to the endless reel of short-form video to which we are all well-acquainted. It is an endless loop. But not the circular loop of a clock…moreso a strange loop, which seems to pass through dimension and space, intersecting and diving deeper into itself like a Klein Bottle, or a fractal.

Have you noticed how Instagram Reels often begin in the middle, with the beginning action coming at the end, right before the video loops around? Hopefully not, hopefully you don’t watch Instagram Reels. Anyway, this is of course a ploy designed to ensure the audience rewatches, hopefully many times over, ensuring a high view count.

A trick employed by Marclay is though occasional repetition—he inserts the same clip at unexpected times, making it impossible for the audience to deduce a meta-structure beyond the simple rule that the scene will change when the doorway is crossed. This conceit also makes it impossible to know when the film “ends.”

The Klein Bottle suggests an unusual topological path back to the beginning

OK So What Is Happening Right Now?

One clever reviewer in the Guardian notes that Marclay has exceptionally good timing, used both in reference to comedic pacing, and also how his works seem to arrive on the cusp of tremendous upheavals in our collective experience of media. The Clock arrived right at the end of the era of physical media, and Doors just before the proliferation of endless scroll. The former feels like a distinctly “contemporary” work of art, in that it seems made almost exclusively for display at blue chip museums (as I mentioned earlier, The Clock is a physical object, of which only 10 editions exist, each one costing upwards of $10 million), whereas the latter feels much more liminal, like a meme come alive and run amok in the gallery space. Doors would sit comfortably next to many of the multimedia works on display at The Whitney’s 2026 Biennale, which was widely criticized for the lack of coherence and perceived pointlessness of many of the works.

But liminality is in vogue, as is “slop”, pointlessness, inanity, brainrot, folly, repetition, and why not? A century ago, a fascist military party rose to power with the promise of taking over the entire world, and it was only through the manifestation of mankind’s most destructive impulses that this sinister goal was averted. The fascists of today present a much more myopic goal: to separate themselves from everyone else, close their borders, and cloister their economies. It makes sense that the aesthetic representations of such stasis are patterns examined to the point of madness.

One well-documented work from the Venice Biennale, SEAWORLD by Florentina Holzinger, depicts a nude woman riding a jetski in circles, like a caged lion pacing in its enclosure.

In a recent interview with Joshua Citarella, the artist and writer Hito Steyerl notes that the trajectory of the Contemporary Art movement also tracks the beginning and end of the neoliberal project of the Global West—beginning in the 1970s and ending with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. It’s a complex and nuanced argument, worth listening to, but the gist I gather is that, at art fairs such as the Venice Biennale (an event ordinary people rarely attend, not to say that they would have much interest in the “art” on display anyways, divorced as it is from any traditional decorative application most people associate with artwork), artists and their work are used as political tools (nothing new here), tokens of soft power among large, powerful democracies, as well as nation states that give no pretense of being democratic, but would like to maintain some sheen of cultural discourse in order to benefit from access to Western Democratic capital markets.

Steyerl makes the somewhat trite suggestion that online betting markets—broadly unregulated and clearly subject to exploitation by the oddsmaking ruling classes—may replace art as a means of speculative value storage (and by extension, tax evasion). While fleeting vehicles for speculation such as NFTs are openly vacuous and cynical in their value proposition, Doors is markedly nostalgic. There is a bogeyman haunting the hallways of the abandoned hospital. It’s right there, just out of reach, and perhaps even out of time…but it will reach out to grab you if you don’t open the next door.

Speaking of Things Neverending

One weekend eight years ago, I traveled north of London on the train, disembarking at the Waverly station, where a extensive steel truss held aloft sheets of glass, which protected travelers from the rain, just as they done in my days as a student. I had graduated university in Edinburgh in the summer of 2017. Upon my return, I discovered that I did not feel any sense of nostalgia towards the city at all. Many of my friends had moved on. The days were dreary, and the dramatic city that had once inspired majestic charm and mystery were now so familiar as to be relics.

During the day, my friend and host Andrey rose in the morning and went to work. I was not so beholden to time. I wandered the docks of Leith, which had transformed in my absence as the formerly working class neighborhood underwent gentrification. I made the long walk from New Town across the volcanic chasm of the Royal Mile, into the grand city park of the Meadows, up the hill into Morningside, passed my former flatshare on Morningside Road by the Canny Man, and down again towards the Braid, where as a student I used to jog. There were so many stories and versions of myself lost in these hills. On one of these hills, Blackford Hill, my friends and I once watched the northern lights cross the midnight sky. At its toeslope, in a crop of brutalist buildings dedicated to the sciences, I saw David Nutt, the English neuropsychopharmacologist and advocate for MDMA therapy, give his lecture. On a sign outside the entrance, next to the university emblem, was the namesake of this building, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Despite my failure to embrace any sense of a glorious return, I was comforted by the knowledge that there was nothing left for me to do here. I had completed this part of the journey, about which so many old friends remarked to me that “didn’t it all seem like a dream?” (Oh please, don’t say it...), and it all passed over me like a plane flying overhead, deafening and wonderful, filled with passengers who were on their own journey.

I had passed through doors and doors, and I had measured my progress against the ticking of so many clocks. In another universe, I am still in the theater, watching the patterns unfold, attempting to make sense of it all.

Last known location of the author before proceeding through a door.

Sacrifice for an Absent Idol

There was another world below:
sea qui -> º We are here <- 0
Sunken in sulfuric lime,
We had seen a green dream
That a cult may again break bread,
(spirits coated in algae) heard the tremors
Long before they felt the quake…
and tinkling, under olive leaves
The sound of bells ()
as a herd of tender hammers
broke the ceiling above our sleeping heads.

The gates to the underworld sit about a quarter mile beneath the Villa Titus. It’s a pit in the ground about 50 meters deep, full of water tinted green by sulfuric springs that spew healing gas from fissures in the chthonic network of cracks and caves under Lazio. The locals called it Lago di Paterno. Some thousand years ago, walkers in the region called it Lake of Cutilia. Forever ago, a spirit lived here on a floating island of seething green biomass, and a temple was built for her on its shore. Spring-fed pools that puddle the region are all fed by the same supply. So does Rome, way down south along the salt road. It’s the freshest mineral water in the world, made under the auspice of Pluto himself, using the same time-honored method devised some 30,000 years ago. The water was famous for its ability to heal indigestion, and the temple was visited by many writers of the ancient chronicles, who noted the spiritual weight of its location and atmosphere.

Danny and I walked an ancient path down from the ruins of the imperial villa, across a hill dense with insects and skittering lizards with back tattoos colored lapis lazuli, through a grove of olive trees that seemed to have been left to fallow, tall grass waving in a breeze that is endless in summer, and seems to keep people awake and alert, even in the midday heat. The goat man had his sheep somewhere...the sheep are never far, for we could always hear the gentle, flat rattle of their hammered bells as they move from grass to grass, watched over by a pair of massive white dogs with fur like rippling pampas.

We had heard that some divers were meeting up at the lago to haul up the temple and restore it to its former prestige. They were an informal club, a group of dads with a sense of adventure who called themselves *La Guardatore Ombelicose*—the “Navel Gazers.” There was some sense among them, said Cruz, a burly Canadian mercenary of the historical persuasion, who worked up at the villa as an archaeologist for hire, shoveling dirt and counting rocks in a rotating but seasonally coordinated wardrobe of sleeveless flannel shirts, toothpick often cocked to wherever the constellation of Aries happened to be that day, that this would perhaps restore the misfortune that had fallen on the region, he explained, this long shadow of depression cast by some combination of bad luck and bad math that had left them in the lurch, plagued by earthquakes, drought, and droves of horny teenagers with not much else to do but fuck in the fields and litter the hillside with their rubbers like split husks of nectarine. Cruz, for all his knowledge of the underworld, had never plumbed its depths. I’m not much of a swimmer, he said, gesturing to an open pit in the ground, where a group of students sat scratching away at buried roof tiles under the burning sun.

The divers and their families had set up on the shore of the lago. Just beneath the surface was a slab of pink granite covered in gooey algae. The ledge dropped off fast, and beyond it was bottle-green abyss. The Germans were there, a pair of mid thirties rockabilly women who often showed up with their towels and novels, bickering or who knows what; next to them were the Romanians who seemed to have come into town expecting much more from their holiday, but liked it enough to stay. The emptimolygist was there, an old bloke who lived next door to us in Antrodoco, seemed to know everything, and made a great deal of money cultivating rare varieties of desert succulents. A couple deeply bronzed old men were strapped into black banana hammocks and aviators. The teens had arrived, as they always did. They preened and chattered, smoking and performing dips and light pliometrics on the ledge along the road. The boys all had identical haircuts. Some of their tattoos swirled with detail, while others were more like lazy knife marks etched into limestone. They were looking at the girls, but the girls looked only towards one another. Danny and I sat in the grass and watched the divers bring their kit out of black trunks covered in stickers.

First came these big steel tanks, one for each of the four divers. They laid their gear out on the grass and went for a dip, barking like great big seals, all of them fat enough to float, and they had happy white beards that lay flat as their heads emerged. Kids raced in circles. It was a great scene. People were happy. The divers had decided to raise the temple. Today was a new beginning.

Goose swam on by, distrustful of the lakeside action. Goose was proud and feathered, a patron of the lago and generally a grump. He tufted and fanned his white tail, eyed me with suspicion, and turned away, dropping goose shit into the water. Just as he did, one of the old timers dove right on top, surfacing with a smile on his face. He swam in broad strokes and the goose gave chase, rearing his angry crown. The old timer turned in time to see the goose fan out its wings with menace. The old timer batted him away, and the two fought it out for a moment, some cheers and groans from the crowd, a phone procured to film the scene. The two white knights splashed at one another, but the rivalry seemed friendly.

It’s his wife. That’s why they fight, said another old timer, a cigarette pinned to his grin. His wife was transformed into a goose—it was an unfortunate spell. Now he comes to visit her, but still, they fight. I tell him, you shouldn’t bring bread. It’s bad for geese. They cannot abide gluten. Nothing has changed.

A listless cheer arose along the shore: the divers were dressed and standing at the edge of this great green pit in the Earth. They all got back in the water and put hands on each others’ shoulders, seeming to steel themselves for the journey into the underworld, their fins drawing broad ripples. Then they sunk below the surface, crowns of bubbles marking their position. The day’s excitement had come to an intermission, and people got up to buy more beer and snacks and to gossip in the shade.

I took off my clothes and swam. I traced a long arc around the rim of the lago. It was small—you could talk to someone on the other side, and I passed the goose nest, the secret kissing hole, and the purple garlic sellers garden, and she waved at me and smiled as a calico cat laced its tail around her leg. Even the garlic lady was in a good mood. In certain pockets the water became suddenly cold against the paddling footsoles, as if there were strands of sulfuric death that could spiral up to the surface and tickle you.

Enticed, I took a deep breath and pushed myself downwards, straight as a spear, letting out air so that my body sunk. The blue of the sky disappeared and soon everything around me glowed an eerie green. The water never grew dark. I depressurized my ears and sunk lower, feeling the earthward tug of my lungs begging for oxygen. The green hue became stronger. It was beautiful. For a moment, I felt as if I were entering paradise. The water never grew dark and it never became colder, just endless and smooth as the inside of a bulb. But I was not a diver, and I was not destined for the underworld. I kicked up and brought myself back to the world of the living, calmly fighting a burst of red pain that bloomed in my skull, a hook anchored in my head, gritted teeth, hauling me to the surface.

Back on the shore, everyone had a bottle in the hand. The divers had returned while I was out. There was crowd around them. I moved towards the front of the circle, and the triumphant group stood on top of their discarded tools, held each others shoulders, tears streaming from their eyes.

I began to cry as well, for I couldn’t resist giving in to emotion in this moment. Even though we were just foreigners who happened upon the scene, it was clear that we were witnessing this small community in their proudest moment. After so much degradation, finally…a victory.

The fattest and grandest of them—his fluffy beard and red nose gave it away, because my! he looked like he could drink, eat, and fuck with the best of them—he held in his hand a glistening, smooth object, like a large shell, or a broken piece of smoky glass. Moving closer, I saw that it was a woman’s face, carved in marble, sheered from the rest of the head, so that one eye and ear were missing. The mouth remained though, her expression one of placid calm. The divers had found the ancient temple. It was a cause for celebration.

We walked in a barefoot caravan up the road to the bar on the side of the highway. The barkeeper was an amateur sculptor and the yard was filled with human shapes transfigured from bent rebar. Some of the prayed and some of them sinned. He clearly sculpted for all manner of preference, but there didn’t seem to be many buyers, and the rebar statues were as numerous as the crowd that formed in the yard, passing beers and aperitifs around without a care for keeping tab, because the divers had found the temple, and this meant things were going to change for the better.

Cruz was already there when I arrived. He was sucking shots out of the deep navel of one of the divers, who lay naked on a wooden table, the rubber carcass of his wetsuit discarded beneath him. When he raised his head to greet me, four topless women wearing conical hats came by and lifted the table, one at each corner, and led the diver to another part of the yard, a full measure of cognac swirling in his belly button.

Today is a day of celebration, but tomorrow may be different, said Cruz. Despite his inclination towards the past, he had always been one to ruminate on the terror of the future. Since the desecration of this temple, a new cult of Vacuna has emerged, he said. They will be meeting tonight in order to decide what to do. I’m sure of it.

But isn’t it the law of Vacuna that everyone can get along? It’s an easy question to ask, given the state of things. There’s a woman on my arm, speaking a language I can’t understand but enjoy nevertheless, the languid sentimentality of it! How it echoes with my own deep past, so that I may discern morphemes as they passed her lips. And she’s brought her dog along as well, a little yapping thing with a rhinestone collar that I reach down and hold aloft, so it may see the happy faces milling about in the fading remains of the day.

Tutting and rubbing his chin, Cruz looked towards the mountains. For every goddess, there is a consort and a rival. As the balance of power shifts in favor of one, the other lies in wait. The rival is ready—they have spent these quiet centuries trimming their plumage.

Where is this rival cult, I ask?

Right in the center of town, hidden where most wouldn’t expect. I’ll be heading there later in disguise.

Ever the shapeshifter, Cruz had added sleeves to his shirt. Danny was nearby, and I pulled him into our conversation, generously assisting his exit from some game of cards through a series of apologetic gulps, I downed the pyramid of spritz flutes in front of him. Can we meet you, I asked?

Sure.

But how do we blend in?

Dress like you drive a scooter, he said. Sneakers, pre-ripped jeans, and a tight black tee shirt with a big, stupid logo on the front.

With that cryptic aside, he finished his drink and was gone. So we understood that our journey had not ended, not here in this garden…the auspice of the temple’s visage could only provide temporary respite. Within the heart of the town, the cult was still active, if Cruz was to be believed, and though we were reluctant, Danny and I resolve to follow him into the darkness.

JJ Weihl has serious savior energy at the onset of her debut performance of the newest Discovery Zone record, Library Copy Do Not Remove. She wears a large, white double-breasted blazer, an angular lavalier microphone attached to her head. It’s giving mega-church. Deliberately disregarding her instructions, the Pattern Seeking Brain removes a copy of this experience, a memory, and here it unfolds. Let my record be a simple, imperfect render.

“Thank you for braving the flood in order to get here,” she says, winking to the crowd in the Stone Circle Theater, a few of whom managed to snag pew seats, while a crowd of some hundred or so fill in behind. It’s a packed house for this curious new work, not quite an album, per se, and certainly nothing like the nostalgic city pop on 2024’s Quantum Web. Commissioned for a sound installation at the Zeiss-Groß Planetarium in Berlin, a structure that is itself shaped like a gigantic white eye built from metal cells, Library Copy is almost entirely instrumental—a floating mass, sound congealed together like a thick, gelatinous bubble containing some alien intelligence, observing the Earth and responding in its tonal language. This new record is slow, meditative, and sparkles with artifacts of digital history.

The site of tonight’s performance was once a church. Tonight, it has been transformed into a planetarium. Stars glitter on the dark ceiling, where there may typically be a vision of heavenly light. Another performance is scheduled for later in the week, in Los Angeles.

I’m inclined to Weihl’s conceptual interests: the literature of Borges, quantum physics, nostalgia for the early days of the internet. In 2024 she joined on my radio program Thrust. She presents as a multimedia artist. I take this to mean that the research and concepts are given an equal weight to the musicality and technical performance. There is as much to talk about as there is to sing. The stage is set up for a multimedia presentation of some form...a lecture, or a demonstration. There are recognizable items, as well as other objects that appear to be arcane, the tools of an alchemist. A table holds a loupe, a large hardcover book; a theremin sits on a stand to the side. Behind, acting as the professor’s blackboard, is a projector screen stretched on a frame.

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We did brave a flood, by the way. I live about ten minutes up the hill from Stone Circle. It would have been a leisurely stroll had the sky not cracked open. The force of the rain was awesome. It seemed to come as an orgasmic release, after agonizing tension. The streets flooded over the sidewalk. Cƒ- and I hid in a deli on Fresh Pond Road, along with a group of kids in soccer uniforms, a couple in workout gear, and a man who had ended his afternoon jog with the purchase of a bottle of red wine and a frozen pizza. So together we witnessed the first outcry of what by most reports looks to be an angry, petulant summer. El Niño. The kid is back for revenge.

When it pours in New York City, everybody knows. The videos flood in, mostly from parts of Brooklyn and Queens that sit at the basin of slopes. CNN loves this stuff. A woman descends from the bus and is immediately knocked sideways. Her friends cackle and gasp in the background. Cars get stuck at intersections and honk with dumb impatience but, at the same time, in these moments the vehicles have never been more anthropomorphic: they are like armored Serengeti grazers...hippos and gazelles at the watering hole, with big, bovine eyes. When it pours, we dance. We danced and danced down 70th ave, Cƒ- and I, never a puddle breaching the berm of our leather soles. We danced our way to the theater to see Discovery Zone perform Library Copy Do Not Remove.

Time Wharp opened the show. What a pair. That little keyboard with the rubber tube attachment, what’s it called? I always forget. I so fondly remember watching one of the members of Fleet Foxes walking through the streets of Paris in one of Vincent Moon’s Takeaway Shows, the dappled plaster church walls, heavily saturated sunlight washing out the troubadours as they stood in a circle in a grand room with a wooden floor and domed ceiling—this was the space I imagined my adulthood would inhabit, a rustic and sober secret, the abandoned historical turned over to a magisterial new “now!” So this “now” is a moment for magic, bent and forced by electric tools to the whim of the artist...

The melodica, that’s what it’s called. Time Wharp sends it all into a magic box. Signals are transmogrified and grafted onto one another; a fleshy, monstrous sound comes forth. The floor trembles a little. There are endless variations of the loop soloist, the artist who sits alone and places their ideas into a black box, then conjuring forth, one by one, arrangements and harmonies, as if an entire ensemble were stored inside. Time Wharp had variety, variegation; something algorithmic working behind the scenes. The music came back strewn with fissures and cracks, damaged by its journey through the cables. Perhaps, inside the box, the sound had traveled thousands and miles, scraping the contours of some digital landscape and reemerging scratched and buffed.

Library Copy Do Not Remove tells a story. A purple eye “passes through holographic chambers of memory, replication, and recognition.” At the center is an eternal, circular library. The suite is accompanied by a film produced by Mark Dorf. Beginning with the birth of a star, the film recedes into a set of endless corridors facing identical doors, a liminal space, not unlike the Eyewitness educational films first aired in 1994, except the tigers and parakeets and toucans are gone, and the eye searches desperately for symbolism in this empty space. The eye descends to Earth and crawls across the planet. Multiple crucial images make an appearance: there is a mysterious base in the arctic circle; a facility at CERN, where a giant cylinder sits housed in a lattice of tubes; a quantum computer, hung like a hornets nest, shines in gold. Through another door is the library, a hexagonal chamber worthy of Borges Library of Babel, in which every permutation of every linguistic idea is written in volumes arranged randomly in infinite rooms, and scholars search for single words and sentences among the random combinations of symbols. The eye visits a museum, or prison, where trees are stored in identical glass containers arranged in endless rows. On a mountainous slope, a human perspective seems to stumble as it moves through rendered trees.

Hands released, Weihl is free to play. Weihl is a great guitarist. The theremin controls some sculpted contour of her vocals, and she draws huge volumes of sound out of the air. The music ascends, there is little percussion driving us forward, so the sound floats, and the audience levitates, the same as this disembodied purple orb, leaving the Stone Circle Theater and visiting these imaginative worlds with their uncertain rendered edges. For one piece, the microphone picks up the rustling pages of a book, as Weihl describes the Eternal Library, holding some device attached to a cable that projects the flat plane of the text onto the projector behind her.

The lav mic is having a moment. It’s the artistic embrace of closeness, and the freedom to gesture and toggle. In this context, Weihl is a scholar of the Eternal Library, and we are students learning. In this context, the lav mic is suddenly the true successor to the SM58. Likely this was the case from the very beginning...we just couldn’t see it. The 2000s had its novel images of the future, after all, the cyberdecks and gooey GUIs, wraparound Oakleys—there was a notion that we would be “on the go”, and we would need to take tech with us. This is the context Discovery Zone inhabits, one in which there is still a future. And it’s funny to think that in many cases, tech has rooted us in place, practically turned us all to stone.

Why didn’t we love the lav mic back then? Most likely, there was some combination of signifiers that made it unserious, uncool. Likely the embarrassment of the Mickey Mouse Club pop stars—Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and his boy band cohort—killed any amount of sex appeal. There are of course the preachers and the CFOs. We just weren’t ready for something to be clipped to our faces.

You have to remember that for a long time, music was something “cool” people did. Specifically, cool, tough, people. Men. Microphones were for men. Rock musicians were working class (like actually working class), in the US and the UK, and they grew up surrounded by machinery. They worked at car manufacturing plants. Music was extremely physical, horny, and relied on the brutish logic of electric amplification. As a culture we became obsessed with amplification, and an aesthetic vocabulary developed around this weighty, industrial image. In the early days, people didn’t really hold microphones at all. Live sound was finicky, you couldn’t move things around so much. The PA system was prone to feedback. The mic stayed in one place and the singer approached it like a pulpit. That was the technology of the time: a heavy guitar, gigantic stacks of amplifiers (often fake, for the vibes) behind you on stage, you held a large, phallic microphone up to your face. Next came wireless—we went through the Fist Mic era. This was a hip-hop thing. You had to “wield the mic”, as a weapon. You held it cocked at a surly angle. R&B and pop singers have this particular grip, like how you hold a wine glass. It’s very specific. That was then. But now, now, I mean holy shit...now we see Dijon on stage at Coachella, thrashing into the crowd and it was like, yeah, okay, we got something here. He looks cool with a lav. JJ looks ethereal with their apparatus floating in front of her, another sensory sphere taking in data.

And finally, I ask: what can music be? In this theater we seem light years away from the formats I grew up on. It is also different from so many of the inventive systems electronic artists have developed—the cascade of referential samples in Oneohtrix Point Never, the cyborg augmentation of Bon Iver, or the algorithmic jams of Autechre. There is an intimacy to the stage show. Apparently, this is one of only two (2) performances of the entire record. But maybe with encouragement and planning, Library Copy Do Not Remove will come to a planetarium near you.

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Once a traveler, always a traveler. Some people move from their kitchen to their backyard, look out upon the blue hills beyond their green, weld-wire fence, and from this vantage point they can intuit all of the depth of the world necessary to endure another day, and to perhaps even find joy and security in their life. Others travel to the ends of the Earth and find nothing; they return home expecting a reward that never comes.

As a citizen of the world, holding no nationality and no political allegiances, the Pattern Seeking Brain attempts to meet each place on its own terms. To travel without judgement or preconceptions requires a mix of hubris and ego, humility and benevolence, adventure and idealization, all of which I am equipped to handle (I think). I can be the fool and the American, the idealist and bohemian, the silent partisan and the sober outsider.

It requires great privilege to travel freely. It also requires great privilege to go no place and to know nothing. People are forcibly displaced—they occupy the same terminals and ports as tourists and traders, refugees and wanderers. They eventually settle and establish minor dynasties, their children acclimate and become foreign to them. Languages and traditions become lost. Part of my own family originated in Italy. I am reminded of this aspect of my history, even more so than the nature of my names—Ross is predominantly Scottish, with Gaelic and Germanic derivations, containing many meanings depending on its origin, including horse, and headland, a coastal cliff that extends towards the edge of a landscape; the clan Ross is of no relation, but my last name, Devlin, dates back to the 900s in Tyrone, Ireland—the Italian-ness I’ve grown to embody as an American, having little cultural or traditional connection to the country, likely is assumed due to the color of my skin.

It’s Been 10 Years of Realizing Things

In 2016, a prominent public intellectual, whose family originated in Europe and Armenia, experiences an epiphany. She records a video detailing these revelations. There is nothing else to do but upload the video; she knows that her words will spread naturally, assumed into the thoughts and opinions of others, as a song is repeated and adapted, and for her those who keep their ears open to her words, they carry the essential simplicity of a melody.

Seated on a black leather armchair, Kylie Jenner, a child of conspicuous providence, born into one of American capitalism’s most favored dynasties, an oracle of the flows of consumer capital, outlines a new vision for interpreting the course of time. “Every year has a new energy,” she says. “I feel like this year is really about, like, the year of just realizing stuff.” “Everyone around me,” she says, “we’re all just, like, realizing things.”

notice the skulls….

In the scene, possibly composed by Jenner, but just as likely the careful work of some off-screen advisers, various objects give clues to decipher her prophecy. She holds a cozy mug. Another mug sits on the side table. A dual presence of mugs could suggest—I’m purely speculating here—an anticipated need for more coffee. More coffee than one mug can possibly hold. The cup runneth over—the two of cups, in the tarot deck, represents a union of strong forces, and the enduring power of love. But both of the mugs are empty, suggesting an expectation. Like the empty shoes and stockings left out in the Yule time traditions of the post-animist Christian world, there is room in the cup for more. The sprits will grant more to those who deserve it...the spirits or the ancestors, or God, or Mom & Dad.

Providence comes from unlikely sources, and in the eyes of the oracle it is no esoteric or complicated thing. Blessings simply fall upon those who covet them most.

On a coffee table decorated in a harlequin pinstripe are balled-up nitrite gloves, evidence of recent work requiring a separation between hand and surface. Something delicate was examined up close. A gold candle flickers on the table, and behind it is a second fire. The gas hearth produces a perfect, unwavering fan of cold flames. A pair of dualities: two mugs and two fires, indicating not just a need for warmth and comfort, but also insight.

Leering from the shelf behind Jenner is third dual image: two dimorphic skulls face the audience as she speaks. A common specter of the vanitas, a Renaissance painting format invoking the gravity of mortality, the Memento Mori is a stark, unambiguous symbol, reminding us that the veil of life is fragile and ephemeral. Behind the curtain, death awaits. Even for Kylie Jenner.

El Greco, active during the time of the Rennaissance, though considered to be a early progenitor of a much more modern style, here depicts the two skulls of Adam & Eve.

This depiction from Circle of Philippe de Champaigne, dated 1650, is on display at Musée de Tesse in Le Mans.

Periods of tremendous upheaval are often given names as historical markers. In Ancient Rome, the year 69 AD is marked as a violent transition of power, away from Nero, who oversaw the end of the first imperial dynasty in the Year of Four Emperors, all of whom were murdered or committed suicide except for Vespasian, who took power on July 1, and succeeded in ushering in a new period of dynastic stability. Almost two millennia later, 1969 was the “Summer of Love”, characterized by the superficial embrace of psychoactive chemicals and sexual liberation, greater rights for women and people of color, as well as the deadly battles that ensued between the State and activists defending their democratic rights.

So 2016 was the year of “Realizing Things”. 2018 was the “Year of the Scammer”. In 2019 we were visited by “Hot Girl Summer”. Seeing an opportunity to elicit public attention, Tom Hanks’ wayward, carribophile son Chet, dubbed 2020 “White Boy Summer”. Most recently there was “Brat Summer”, arriving with sudden, garish mania, accompanied by a color green as delightfully juvenile as it was foreboding. The green of Brat Summer is the color of goblins, of toxic slime, and of Radium, the radioactive chemical element that was once painted onto a variety of everyday household products. We innocently touted its magisterial glow, unaware that the cursed material would begin to soften bone, piercing the body like an invisible hail storm. Exposure to even small amounts of Radium, over time, leads to a painful, slow death.

Here’s What I am Going to Do

Let me temporarily forgive myself for my hubris. Let 2026 be the Year of Doing Things. The Summer of doing. This summer I will release my 3rd book, a product of two years of work, and the largest and most intimate project I’ve participated in. The journey I took to get there has been an immense privilege. In time I will reveal more.

In the immediate term, I’m going back to Rome. The last and only time I visited Rome was in 2014, during a long layover. I took a train from the airport and met friends in the city center. We wandered without direction and passed in front of monuments to past civilizations. In between the sculptures, fountains, and grand constructions of bread and circuses were more ordinary, contemporary expressions of every day life: graffiti in the alleyways, stalls selling trinkets and cheap wine, human shit and piss laid just out of sight of the passing crowds. There was the sweat that is so common on tourists, who passed in front of the café where we sat and willed away gentle hours, their respective origins and nationalities revealed in small clues—the length of their pant legs, the brand of their sneakers and backpacks, and whether or not they carried large plastic water bottles decorated with stickers. I left Rome that night, boarding a flight to Casablanca, Morocco.

The Rome I intend to return to is the setting of Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Satyricon, Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza. It is a giant municipal center of global business and the epicenter of a tourism in ancient history. It is the place observed by Robert Musil in his “Posthumous Papers of a Living Author”, the recordings of a wanderer displaced from his home country by the Nazis, drawn to the small idiosyncrasies of flies and monkeys, tomb stones and low talkers of the late night. It is the eternal city within which holds the world’s smallest sovereign state, the Vatican, an enclave dedicated to the service of the Catholic God’s emissary on Earth (who is, at this time, an American named “Bob”).

There are many Romes that may reveal themselves to me. There is the Rome of contemporary art, advertising open calls, Q&As, performance nights and engagements presented in a similarly cosmopolitan style to the artist engagements of Berlin, London, and New York, which are doubtless the Eternal City’s peers. There is the Rome of the permanent revolution, dedicated to radical economics and politics, which stands in solidarity to the ongoing massacre of Palestinians, as the Italian military remains culpable for their lack of protection to the flotilla delivering aid to Gaza (although Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suspended their military partnership in April of this year, years too late to prevent the destruction of entire cities, and the displacement of millions). Like many nation states whose history have included civil turmoil, flirtations with the dark obsessions of fascism, and personal enrichment through colonization projects, Rome exists as a citadel of ascendant powers whose layers become murkier the higher one climbs. At the bottom of this tower are ordinary people who make their living, and during they night, they may toast to love or success, to freedom, or defiance.

The Autumn of Emperors

This Rome I attempt to discover is the Rome of Titus, who became emperor on his 39th birthday, and presided over the construction of the Coliseum, as well as the fallout to the eruption of Vesuvius and the 80 CE great fires, before suddenly falling ill during a trip to his vacation home just two years into his reign.

Titus had crystalized his political power in the eyes of the Roman Empire when he was just 31, the same age I am now, when he destroyed the city of Jerusalem and their holy temple, killing thousands, and returning to Rome with over one hundred thousands Judean citizens, taken as slaves. Over fifty years later, it was suggested in writings by Suetonius, the secretary to Hadrian (a source whose objectivity has come under scrutiny) that Titus’ death was caused, or at the very least abetted by his brother Domitian, who lived in the shadow of his fathers legacy, and saw little of his emperor brother, as they were 22 years apart in age. Domitian wore wigs to hide the shame of his premature baldness. He was described variously as cunning, effective, and deeply cognizant of military matters—also intellectually lazy, prone to petty jealousies, and emotionally unstable.

According to one telling of the end of Titus, Domitian contracted the services of an unwitting assassin. Word passed through intermediaries, descending the chain of Domitian’s envoys and consuls, to reach a young man of fifteen, who lived in a shack on the Mediterranean coast, and worked for his father as a fisherman. The young man was approached at a bar where he frequently spent evenings playing cards and games of chance, and he was offered a substantial payment that he never received. The youth, as he would be classified by today’s standards, knew his task well, having a lifelong familiarity with the shores of Lazio, and he went by torchlight to a hidden beach, at low tide, to hunt the soft, shell-less snail that swims on soft black wings, a hermaphroditic blob that mates in grand orgies of hundreds, and whose diet of seaweed produces a toxicity that causes motor failure, convulsion, and fever. With his torch embedded in the sand, the boy slit open the black body, large and pulsing like a human heart, and collected the secretion of the sea hare in a clay bowl. Mixed with wine, this poison was delivered to Titus. The nameless assassin, having no knowledge of his crime, was later visited at the same bar by suspicious figures, whose garments, according to eye witnesses, seemed conspicuously ragged, as if they were costumes. The boy proceeded to get drunk with these unfamiliar men, who claimed to be merchants, and departed with them. The next morning, his body was pulled ashore in a net brimming with fish, his throat cut lengthwise.

The location of Titus’ death remains unknown to contemporary scholarship. But thousands of years later, rumors of a sunken villa in the hills outside of the Eternal City drew the attention of archaeologists. It was always common knowledge to the residents of Castel Sant’Angelo that the concrete ruins protruding from the stramma, mellow, and wild pepper growing through its pores was a grand villa belonging to the late emperor, inherited from its initial construction two centuries before his birth, and extensively renovated to suit the leisure of the time, which included running hot water, bathing pools, and heated floors. Erased from the landscape by an earthquake, the diggers began to unearth this site in 2011, in an ongoing project that continues today under the supervision of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Canadian Saint Mary’s University. This, too, is the Rome that I seek.

Album

Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou - Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems

Tucked down a flight of stairs in the Lower East Side of Manhattan is the spirited used bookstore Aeon. Today there are chairs set around the counter, and the two musicians Atkinson and Vantzou sit and converse with a crowd of people who’ve come to celebrate their new collaborative record, which was recorded on various islands in the Mediterranean, including Delphi, and Hydra, in Greece.

Separately, both of these artists have been doing their thing for decades. Atkinson runs Shelter Press and has an extensive discography. Her music primarily incorporates keyboards, field recordings, and slow, monastic recitations of poetry. Vantzou, who I interviewed in 2018 for Bandcamp Daily, has had several career reinventions, beginning with a series of highly controlled chamber music records, and gradually growing to incorporate electroacoustic, voice, and collaborative records. In their Reflections, the duo present a world of calm and reflection. it is quiet music, beautiful and vast, and it gives itself up to mystery, allowing the anxious question of certainty and fate to wash away, as in a meditation.

Book

Roberto Bolaño - Distant Stars

Bolaño is now recognized as one of the most significant authors of global fiction. His lifelong commitment to poetry and letters as a means to achieve emancipation and freedom from tyranny has been heavily romanticized by himself and his peers. For instance, was Bolaño himself imprisoned during the Pinochet regime, supported by the United States, a reign of terror that resulted in widespread disappearance of students and agitators, the cells of backroom discussion burst open, their contents strewn across nations and continents, connected only by newspaper clippings, rumors, and signs written in the sky, as he has claimed? Or was anecdote part of his fictive life? When one encounters Bolaños literature, they understand that his genius lay equally in his careful design of a self-mythology, as it does in his prose.

The mortal cost of survival and dissent is the subject of all Bolaño novels. His heroes are often an unctuous character type: the young, pretentious bohemian. This degenerate smokes, falls in love, does not work, hardly produces any real creative output, and rarely tells the truth. Disreputable and politically dangerous in the eyes of industrial society, these artists and dreamers face tragic ends. They are not real heroes, for they understand that real heroes do not exist. Their enemies, however, are very real, and they hold real power. Thus Bolaño’s struggle of the 1970s and 80s—the dreamer versus the fascist—is one that may feel relevant today in the United States, where fascism has consumed government, media, and increasingly private business; the Marxist nightmare of an unstable monopolistic state that cannot function due to bloat and corruption persists as truth; and all forms of personal discovery in youth are leveraged by substantial student debts, necessitating a naïve entry into a workforce that seems increasingly hostile to the utility of human labor.

In Distant Stars, the narrator Arturo is glib, perhaps a little haughty. We see little of his own world, know little about his appearance and habits, what he eats, who holds his affection. Arturo is 18 years old and aspires to be a poet. His world is very small, consisting of two weekly workshops. Poetry is discussed with great seriousness, but rarely performed and scarcely visible in the text, as Ben Lerner points out in the edition’s introduction. In this way, we are presented with The Artist as a lifestyle, one that contains much social conflict, but rarely any production of art, per se. As the shadow of the regime falls on all aspects of Chilean life, many of his peers are forced to flee, or disappear, and the novel becomes a reportage of rumor, hearsay, and constant dissolution. Arturo’s world becomes a constellation of satellites, as the real world recedes from view, and terror reigns through the constant suggestion of violence.

Arturo encounters and then begins to chart the progression of a man who has many names, many personas, the most consequential of these identities being Carlos Wieder, who is an air force pilot that comes to serve as a metaphorical hero for the new dictatorial regime. Wieder writes poems in the sky, ejecting plumes of vaporized oil from his single engine plane. The ephemerality of these performances, combined with their deadly precision, inspires awe and fear in the people below. Wieder also harbors a terrible secret, and his complicity and symbolic stature within the regime implies that he will be protected from persecution for his crimes.

Reading this novel, I am struck by the powerlessness of Bolaño’s characters. Distant Stars is a political tragedy. At the height of their creative power, they harbor petty narcissism and jealousy towards one another. As the world falls apart, they are left with nothing but fragments of correspondence, and they become archivists and sleuths, desperate to recover a sense of meaning from the tragic senselessness of war. In the end, these concerns of fame and legacy destroy the subjects, and the grand narrative is written by the winners, the fascists who must cling to power at any costs, for they understand that the end of their regime will also mark the end of their legacy, to be revised by those who come after them. This, I believe, is the heart of Bolaño’s project, that evil will persist throughout history, but one day, the artist will complete their masterwork, and it will be finally understood that the true victory over evil is survival.

Performance

Mark Leckey at Giorno Poetry Systems: “Exerts the Physics of Mystics”

In the former apartment of William S. Burroughs on Bowery, the British visual artist Mark Leckey assembles a “variety show” lineup for a weekend of curated performances. His attitude is laid back, and the audience is friendly. Friday’s lineup is satisfyingly eclectic. I was able to attend thanks to a generous gesture from GPS’s archivist, Bonnie.

Hari Kunzru, the author of several books, as well as the fantastic social anthropology podcast Into The Zone, presents a vision of the present day Williamsburg “brand activation” party scene that becomes untenable and horrific under the influence of false images. Kunzru begins the evening, and is the event’s most professorial presence, wearing a tweed sport coat that provides a humorous juxtaposition between the man standing at the podium and the content of his writing, which primarily follows a listless, wayward young man that attends parties and does drugs with his acquaintances, of whose motivations and alliances he is suspicious.

The disaffected environment should be familiar to many creative twenty-somethings who have moved or plan to move to New York City with some fanny pack of romantic preconceptions and aspirations, or those who (like me) otherwise interact with this set of bodies in a professional context. New York is the world capitol of images, in the sense that it a hub for advertising, in particular an increasingly prevalent form of marketing “experience” that attempts to engage the city’s avant garde pedigree and endless stream of consumerist tourism with durational “pop ups”, “takeovers”, and “collabs”, all of which tend to involve a high production visual setting with a guest list of minor and major celebrities, themed cocktails, and some DJ or musical performance.

In these new, unpublished pages, we see Kunzru— whose novels have generally succeeded in addressing “topical” themes such as racial politics, cults, and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic—attempt to grapple with the new imageworld of AI. Born in 1969, he is an elder voice, and is therefore capable of seeing great humor in the absurdity of our socioeconomic environment. The tech founder in his reading—these days, in fiction as well as life, there is always some chipper tech founder lurking offstage, ready to deliver an obnoxious speech—speaks of those who are able to live in decadent metropolises such as New York as “experience privileged”. This line gets a lot of laughs. We are privileged! Everyone is aware of the powerful force field that forms around the New York empire, how nowhere else in the world can possibly live up to its highs, and we are all at the end of the day its feudal subjects, both compensated and taxed by the financial machinery that make such experiences possible.

Gideon Jacobs, whose lectures and narrations confront our acceleration towards an unknown future, and whether or not this future will contain “images” as we currently conceive of them, presents a triptych of works glued together with musical accompaniment by Cassandra Jenkins. Jacobs is concerned with what he sees as the “uselessness of images”. This thesis hinges on interpretations of Genesis, in which humans are created in God’s “image”, and then commit the original sin of developing a self-image, through which we realize our nakedness, and are cast out of paradise. Jacobs connects the scripture to Lacan’s “Mirror Phase” of childhood development, in which the child is able to recognize themselves in a mirror, thus gaining knowledge of their own personhood, and the development of an ego. Crucially, Lacan sees this moment as a misidentification: the reality of being is that the body contains discrete, distributed systems which work together and cannot be reconciled into any single object. By displacing the self onto an image, we in fact perform a depersonalization. In both metaphors, we become separated from the “one” true world. Now, with the proliferation of generated images online that bear no material relation to anything real, it seems increasingly likely that the authority of images will dissolve. For a society that is entirely constructed on interpretation and documentation through images, this revelation bears shocking, existential implications.

Jay the Bucket Drummer marks a transition in the evening towards music. Here, we are brought back to reality: culture born of and performed in the street and subways. There is no theory or framework buttressing the performance. It is music, and it is talent. The Bucket Drummers will soon be performing during the Knicks halftime show, in what will surely be their largest audience yet, at a crucial time where the team advances to the semifinals of the NBA championship.

After this display, the veteran avant garde musician Mick Barr performs a similarly technical assault on guitar. Sheer walls of distorted noise fill the room, amplified by an imposing sound system built by CAVE, a multidisciplinary creative team. Many people in the audience cover their ears.

It is announced that Barr will now “jam” with the Bucket Drummers. The three musicians embrace on stage, and begin to improvise. It is clear on their faces that they are reticent of a possibility to fuse their disparate practices into something beautiful, but after a few measures, everyone locks in, and the extended jam becomes a mix of blues, heavy metal, and martial drumming, with Jay understanding and responding to Barr’s heavily syncopated playing. Soon the three challenge one another, and variety and structure emerges. The trio performs synthesis, their separate constellations of life colliding into a beautiful, single expression. Having traveled into the depths of language, the fiction and the anxiety of unknowing, we are brought back to life by the language of music.

Thanks for reading. Playlist below the pay wall.

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A woman came to the door to deliver a package to my neighbor. She had to take some photos, presumably to satisfy her disembodied employment bot. She took a photo of the building, then the package, then one of my neighbor holding the package in front of her face so that she would not appear in the frame.

The woman was wearing a brown t-shirt with a graphic print of torn fabric, so that it appeared the t-shirt was shredding apart at the center due to the power of her enormous cartoon breasts, which were depicted as wet, restrained by a blue bikini top.

Thus begins another week on the Pond overlooking idyllic Ridgewood, Queens, where surprise and intrigue lie around every corner.

Let’s Play Outside

It’s fully spring time, and the outdoor DJ soundsystems are ready for deployment.

• Mansions, New York’s premiere carpeted wine bar and “fog room” opened last week with a line stretching down the block. Look to them for excellent DJ curation and a reliable stream of “special guests”, who are often likely a big room headliner visiting from out of town. Free before 10pm.

• 690 Ridgwood Garage, a community record store, has been throwing weekend vinyl nights. Free + BYO + good vibes.

• Nikki Nair and Foodman will be at h0l0 Friday night, May 1st. Good ticket price on that one.

• Bushwick OG Millennial pizza spot Robertas is kicking off a new season of their “natural wine party” BEVERAGES on May 2nd, 3-10pm.

• Later that night, May 2nd. Earth Dog’s new rave series loop will kick off at a secret location, with live hardware techno from SPF50 in addition to a full line up. Earth Dog throws the best techno parties in the city, and although this one is sold out, they typically drop last minute tickets on RA if you sign up for notifications.

• Karlala is bringing back the pink for a new season of Public Service, which hops through various parks in Brooklyn throughout the summer. The first jaunt is this weekend, May 3rd, at Herbert Von King Park in Bed Stuy, 2pm.

• Sonicsoap, a soundsystem packed inside of a Tuk Tuk, will team up with the Level Party at Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick on May 16 during the daytime. I’ll be there. Come say hey :D

• Finally, Mister Sunday is back at Nowadays on May 10. Feel the love!

And here’s the playlist. All deep jams. A mix of house, esoterica, new indie, and stormdrain classics.

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Give Me Wings

Floating above the endless scroll, the winged Pattern Seeking Brain has a clear-eyed view of the world below. It is a world of schemes and ploys, traps and temptations. We live in a world of stunts for the sake of stunts. We jump through invisible hoops and perform without awareness. Everywhere we are being watched. It’s innocent. Playful. It’s all for the sake of art.

It was one of those nights where people had strangely familiar faces. It was because I had seen them, or thought I had, or even that these faces were dopplegangers of someone I had once known. But of course it was always something new. Then again, hadn’t I been here a million times, I thought? A million years on planet Earth. Such a long time. Every utterance directed towards me carried monastic weight and importance. People spoke through me, and I heard their thoughts in the soup of consciousness before they were conceived and delivered by voice. It rattled a deep cage. Something was amiss, a red herring, a glitch, but the danger was so far away, a million miles over the horizon line, and it wasn’t going to arrive here soon, the danger was not imminent, I thought, receiving a notification in my phone, that it was unseasonably warm, that the last few years in New York had set records for how hot it was, that the records would continue to be set, the heat would continue to rise, but now, at least right now, there was calm, and there was no reason to panic. Not yet.

Still, though. A body possesses a sense for the eye of another. Science posits that this is an awareness of electromagnetic fields, in humans merely present as artifact of evolution subdued by a gradual deference to the eye, but supremely powerful in certain species of whales and sharks, whose flanks detect magnetic energy through the medium of water, and also in birds, who see it physically, with the four cone structure of their eyes that can perceive so many colors invisible to us. Still, through some twang of uncertainty, I felt I was being watched.

First, a pixelated video

What do I see upon the screen? I see that Brazil loves skateboarding. I love skateboarding and I love Brazil. I love the memory of walking the length of ancient Copacabana, the dream of the marvelous city, its impossible valleys cradling the joy of life as the waves break high on the beach. The screen shows me what I love. This happened back in 2025.

Brazil loves skateboarding so much they let Red Bull do one of their stunts. Red Bull, you know, the drink company. They (I’m assuming the Brazilian Government) let Sandro Dias ride a skateboard down the sloped side of a high rise in Porto Alegre, a 230 foot incline that is evocative of a gigantic skateboard ramp. Your typical skatepark quarterpipe can be twelve feet high. You might see this at an urban park and think “ouch”. A competition half pipe can be over 20 feet high. THe “megaramp”, designed for the competition slash human monster truck rally The X Games, is about 70 feet high, and has almost killed somebody on multiple occasions. The ordinary, non-extreme sports person might encounter a half pipe at a ski resort, where they often sit low on the mountain at the terrain park, and anyone is allowed to use it. Snow presents a bit of a softer landing than concrete or wood laminate.

What tends to happen on snow is you start from high up the slope, maybe a hundred meters away, and you think, “that looks doable.” Then you ski closer, pick up some speed, and you realize that 20 feet is actually extremely high, and you realize the speed required to even reach the lip of the ramp is far more than you planned for. Being insufficiently prepared, as a regular person, you might either hold back, and thus just sort of scoot along the bottom of the ramp, dwarfed by its extraordinary proportions, as the athlete Elizabeth Swaney did during the 2018 Winter Olympics. Swaney was, by Olympics standards, a regular person. She was a rower in college, and strove to participate in the Olympics purely in fulfillment of a personal dream. She enacted a ploy of questionable sportsmanship, representing a country where there would be very little competition for a spot on the team (Hungary), and achieved the necessary Olympic qualifying score by attending a series of sanctioned competitions where there were fewer than 30 other female competitors. This was undoubtedly the most expensive and roundabout way to qualify for the Olympics, but it worked. And the world got to watch her scoot along the half pipe.

Sandro Dias is not a regular person. He’s been a professional skater since the 1980s, has successful completed a 900, and holds multiple world titles. He completed this insane Red Bull-sponsored stunt late in his career, at the age of 50 years old.

In the blurry frame, taken from the ground and zoomed in as far as the camera is capable, is the Centro Administrativo Fernando Ferrari. It is a somewhat symmetrical structure, shaped like the fin of a rocket, with either side steeply sloped towards the ground. A modernist structure, the building is emblematic of Brazil’s bold architectural movement that began in the inland planned capitol of Brasilia, as the country rallied behind their visionary champion, the landscape architect Roberto Marx. The worldwide Modernist architectural movement gave us many beautiful slopes that facilitate the graceful flight of skateboards. Kids probably rode by this building in Porto Alegre on their way to school every day and thought to themselves—as the skater often sees their world as a playground of endless potential, where everything is a skate spot—thought “wouldn’t it be cool to hit that?” Well, here comes Red Bull, and also the luxury apparel brand Prada, and they’re going to ensure sufficient safety standards are in place to protect Dias from dying, and they’re going to provide a bunch of cameras, too.

While clearly the result of meticulous planning, these marketing stunts are eerie. They sort of just “appear” on the digital timeline, an apparition from a strange dream come true through the machination of global capital. Oh yeah by the way, did you see that video?

Who Was The Father of Jacks?

Friday in Manhattan presented one of the first gorgeous days of the year. Everyone amped up, their behavior becomes a little frantic, and the people are given to fly through the city, colliding with friends they haven’t seen in years, ex-lovers and classmates, rivals and contemporaries, and suddenly, imbued with bathos and charm, everyone looks familiar. We’ve met before, haven’t we? Maybe. Probably last year. That day the weather broke, when we all went outside.

I was over in Flatiron to meet Basil for lunch. Basil is a concert violinist, and flew in from London to play in a New Music ensemble at the Frick Museum. We went to S&P Diner and waited in line along the wall. Solo diners chowed down at the bar and servers whizzed by with platters piled high with plates of sliced beef on rye, soda bubbles crushed against the walls of plastic glasses. I had the triple decker pastrami and turkey, a cherry limeade, and we shared a plate of latkes. The slaw was divine. My sandwich gradually decomposed into a colorful mass as the juice soaked through the bread. I slammed the last bites with a fork. It’d been years and there was much to catch up on. I told Basil about my next book I’m working on, for which I would later to decamp to Tompkins Square to shoot some interview “content”. But first, Basil told me the story of a marketing stunt.

April 6th, in Camden, Basil and a friend are tipped off about a promotional giveaway, he says, by the 2.3M follower personality Eating With Tod, a London everyman with a chummy demeanor and an inoffensive style native to the laptop professional class, rubbing his hands together as he announces a free giveaway at Father of Jack, a new “sourdough pizzeria” in Hoxton. Father of Jack created an Instagram account on April 2nd. On April 3rd, they pasted a menu to a brick wall, advertising their opening day as April 8th, with a selection of pies available, containing inspired pairings of appropriately rustic ingredients: salami n’duja, chicken and pesto, pepper and pepperoncini. How original! The two make a reservation, hooked by the promise of a free artisanal dinner, and on Wednesday they bike over to Hoxton and sit down to try this much hyped establishment. When they arrive, says Basil, there are cameras everywhere, somewhat invasively filming diners, interviewing people, collecting data. The scene is familiar: here in New York, the frenetic pace of viral marketing campaigns thrive on social media, where a ten second clip of someone chowing down on a fresh slice can potentially be seen by millions.

But the pizza was just fine, says Basil. It was good. “It tasted, well, like Pizza Hut!” he said. Diners were happy to give their praise to the camera. Ensnared by hype! I laughed, thinking, “there you have it”, because how good can a pizza possibly be? I’ve paid $4 and $5 and $6 for a fantastic slice. L’Industrie? Good pizza. Joes? Good pizza. Lil Frankies? That’s good pizza. La Lanterna di Vittorio? Damn good pizza. Mano’s and Rosa’s up in Queens? Mmmm, mm, mm. Coratos I and II down under the M? Eh...I mean, pizza is pizza. Every pizza I eat, with slim exceptions, clears the bar of being “good pizza”. It’s pizza!

Apparently, Father of Jack made good pizza, too. But on April 9th, the jig was up. Every diner, including my friend Basil, had in fact paid for their pizza, if not with cash, than with their unwitting participation in a stunt. There was no kitchen in the restaurant, the owner had never made a pizza in his life, and Father of Jack was in fact a ruse, engineered by a corporation with over 400 locations in the UK. The pizza, it was revealed, had been cooked at a Papa Johns location down the road, and was delivered through the back door.

Father of Jack was a stunt put on by Papa Johns, the widely known restaurant chain that was once taken to court under accusations of false advertising for simply stating they use “better ingredients”. Having served its purpose, the trap door closed, the restaurant disappeared, and everyone left with the vague notion of having been taken for a ride.

There’s such thing as a free lunch.

Going to the Galleries

The day kept chugging along, and after sitting for a brief interview, Wes and I made our way down to Canal to see the art.

earshot.nyc sits above the canal street hubbub in an airy, well-lit studio on the 3rd floor. Outside, trinket sellers and knockoff hawkers haggle with tourists. A weed store glows obsequiously. The studio is spacious, framed by a plywood DJ booth with a small CRT monitor inset in the center. The DJ cued a good selection of house records. There were bottles of wine in the cooler. Not the cheap stuff they have over at the blue chips in Chelsea—natural wine, with artsy labels, no less.

On Friday, the gallery hosted the group show “Pony”, curated by Kathy Au and themed around miniatures. There were rumors that the owners of the space were Rich Software Guys Who Like to Party. “I don’t know anything about them,” said Kathy. “Just that they go to Public Records.” Her own piece was described in self-effacing fashion, the scope of her work, in her view, limited by the curator’s dilemma of having to both make art and wrangle the display of twenty or so other artists. Despite her modesty, Au’s piece was the clear key to understanding the show’s aesthetic doctrine. A trio of quaint clay frames in a deep, lipstick red, with silver folk charms displaying traditional Roman symbols of luck and fortune inset around the edge: corno, the twisted horn of fertility; mano cornuto, the horned hand of good luck; lips, wings, fish, and horses. The show was a display of such auspicious charms and symbols, and the audience had to look closely to determine their purpose.

Further down the wall, Liv Ryan assembled light swatches of woven blue fabric over a frame, decorated with an image of swimmers in the Red Hook pool. The effect was immersive, as if the fabric were transparent, and the scene lay behind a screened window. In the swimmers and the light fabric was the memory of childhood summers, a sense of gazing up at the light from under bed sheets. Next to it was a silver print of two people reading magazines underneath a mounted Marlin, by Mauricio Garcia. Again, the composition was mysterious and evasive. Was it an original photo? A composite? The fish appeared larger than life, the implication of its power dangling like a sword over the living room, its capture and defeat symbolizing a triumph rendered everyday by the relaxed manner of the subjects below. In a pencil drawing on the facing wall, the bodies of smokers evaporated beneath them, their faces floating above beds of wispy vapor.

Since we arrived at six on the dot, Wes and I had time to enjoy the show slowly, taking in each piece without distraction. I turned my head from the wall and found the place had packed out. Like many independent group exhibitions, the crowd was a bunch of rough dudes dressed in sun-faded workwear, complimented by stylish, beautiful women. I was temporarily distracted by a face I thought I recognized. It was eerie, and I felt self-conscious—was I leering? But the mind cannot rest when it registers a face in the crowd. After running down an internal list of any possible degrees of separation, I realized I did not know this person at all. I had merely observed them, hundreds of times, passively on Instagram, as they modeled clothing for a friend’s fashion resale store.

The most evocative piece at the Pony show was a simple polaroid photo. Taken recently at Rockaway Beach, the image depicts an overcast day, sand meeting water as the shore curves away from the horizon. A couple figures are visible in the background, blurry and unrefined, these smudges walk along a faint line of what appears to be yellow police tape. In the center of the image, a large, smooth grey body sparkles in the sunlight like a massive wet stone. We see it is a dead whale. Here something so large as to be mythic, godlike, the proportions of its body impossible without the suspended physics of water, a heart and lungs larger than people and cars, a thing that exists, yes, it is real, to whom there is no predation or danger, just the entirety of the worlds oceans and a monastic song that may travel millions of miles. Here it is, tiny in the frame, no larger than a silver charm, dead on the shore. Its visitation into our world costs the whale its life, a sacrifice for which we may meditate, gleaning a small glimpse into the immensity of creation.

New Noise

Back on Canal, the sun was beginning to set, and with new friends in tow, we headed over to Priv.Y Gallery on Hester Street, where Basta Magazine and Jabari Wembley produced the group show titled “New Noise”, with many contributors visiting from Los Angeles. The scene here couldn’t be more different. Upon the onset of night, color faded from the crowd, their outfits more austere and severe. The work on display was similarly eclectic, but here the artists had teeth and claws, and their work looked at us not from the infinite regress of tradition, but from the ironic, chrome sheen of the internet. There was humor, culture, and immediacy in the works on display. The title of the show perhaps pointed towards noise of the musical kind, the artifacts and surface tension that often render songs real, believable. In the solitude of a clinical studio, the application of noise to a record is a subtle postproduction practice. The Wembley show celebrated “noise” as an artifact of humanity.

Near the front door, almost unnoticed if not for the caravan of fantastic sneakers and daggerish heels drawing my eye downwards, Marley White placed multiple doorstops against the wall with chunky gothic steel faces, the typical rubber stopper substituted for a cloven deer hoof. Squeezing through the crowded melee, I arrived at a print from photographer Zamar Velez, who produced a cinematic shot of a woman inspecting her nails, her skin gloriously black, a massive blue sky behind her adding weight to the intimate depiction. “This is it”, remarked Wes. Shedding a critical eye, we were deeply and momentarily grounded. Unassuming but powerful up close, the subject’s expression announced presence and authority. Here was a person. We were here, if only for a little while.

Two painters from New York dominated the wall in the back of the gallery. Jeannie Yoo presented a scene of bulbous compression, the figure in her painting struggling to fit within the frame, her dimensions cubic and distorted, nipples positioned like moles along a soft flank of pink skin. Within the crook of her curved leg, a tiny man stands in nothing but tube socks, legs and arms spread, his modest penis dangling like a cartoon finger. “Here he comes,” the canvas suggested. Across from Yoo was Saskia Luna. On a smaller canvas, her nude figure possessed allure but rejected eroticism, and instead drew the viewer into an unsettling and claustrophobic carnivalesque. Slim and muscular, the woman in the picture was tanned, her skin almost the same color as the sickly wall behind her, reminiscent of so many cheap hotel rooms and Landlord Special dumpsterdive apartments. The slight definition of abdominal muscles was a subtle flex (ha!), and the eye moves throughout the canvas naturally, taking in the excellent rendering. Her long hair suggests youth. There are tan lines on her breasts. Like the nubile thieves in Spring Breakers, she hides her face behind a mask, in this case a plastic disfiguration of Spider Man, strangely ill-conceived, suggesting a bootleg purchase at some seedy costume shop, or the prize from a boardwalk carnival shooting gallery, with a string bunching her blonde hair against her head. One eye looks at the viewer, seductive but reticent, and her posture suggests a slight discomfort, perhaps even a chill, acknowledging the voyeurism inherent in our gaze.

Was this “Hot Girl Feminism”? We are quite a few years into this trendy proliferation of figurative work by female painters, depicting feminine beauty that often stands proud and defiant to its ersatz surroundings, these painters who are often themselves slim, beautiful, and capable in front of the camera, advocating for their work as a component of a lifestyle that is sexy and adventurous. They are funny and endearing, cool in that effortless way, and have cultivated taste in New American fine dining, cigarettes, and rompish scenarios that are often captured via flash in a disorienting, baroque display of appendages and positions. There is Chloe Wise and Anna Weyant, both of whom are famous Canadian Millennials selling canvases for six figures. This movement was crystalized in a fall 2025 column by Emily Watlington, titled “The Pleasures and Perils of Hot Girl Feminism”. Watlington’s assessment arrives at ambivalence: sex sells, ah well. But there is no sex here. Beauty, posturing, posing, perhaps. The body is celebrated, but none of the images depict embrace or intimacy. Instead, there is a morose loneliness, and the everpresent suggestion of a lingering eye...the camera phone that we are instinctively primed to expect.

The ambivalence towards tradition was exemplified in the centerpiece of the exhibition: a vinyl print of a pixelated image sourced from the internet by graphic artist waituntilmay, whose conceptual work has appeared on the tween meme rapper Matt Ox. The image is one that “goes hard”. It is there, at the center of it all, that we finally take flight. A faceless man in all white rears a dirt bike back into a vertigo-inducing wheelie. He is poised to race away from the scene. Seated reverse in his lap, a woman’s smile is visible in her cheek, her mouth obscured by a flurry of hair. She holds up a manicured middle finger to the audience. A single apple earbud dangles against her thigh.

By now we had assembled a veritable crew, and the excitement at Priv.Y couldn’t contain our ranks. Outside in the fading light, I put on my jacket, Wes and I, joined by artists Ricky, Germán, Levi, and Nick. We headed off into the night towards Plato Gallery, on Bowery beside the Germania Bank Building, whose six stories were purchased by the photographer Jay Maisel in 1966 for $100,000 (about a million dollars, today). Maisel was the man behind the lens for the iconic cover image to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and he rented his enormous house out as studios to many artists, including Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Roy Litchenstein. Once, on the top floor of the building, I stood with my ear to a closed door, listening to Dev Hynes of Blood Orange warm up his background vocalists in a curved room with windows along both sides. They sung ascending and descending scales, this ghostly choir. Perhaps they were visible from the street, standing in a ring, evoking a private ritual.

Two shows were on at Plato. Sylvia Trotter Ewen’s solo exhibition “Echoes of Elsewhere”, as well as the group show “Phantasma” in the basement. Ewen’s work was vivid, saturated with color. The artist inverts scenes of beachside tranquility by having them bleed into interior structures. Large domes loomed in the background. Concrete slabs of homes receded into nature.

Later, I see myself in the gallery, in an image posted to their instagram page. I remember this moment. I was speaking to Nick, describing the very words you are reading now, identifying myself, practicing my “pitch”, so to speak, as I stumble through the labor of establishing a sense of identity for my work. Nick and I speak about sentences. He has become enthralled with the sentence and its ability to communicate a unique voice. The structure of a sentence may fly or it may fall. It is a death defying stunt, to commit to a sentence, and to follow its circumlocution through the needle eye of an idea. When it succeeds, the sentence carries timeless power. When it fails, it “disrupts the alpha waves”, as Joan Didion put it to her husband at the time, John Gregory Dunne. Nick is reading Stephen King, I am reading Karl Ove Knausgaard, both highly successful novelists who produce massive books that, on a sentence level, are sublime.

But someone was standing behind us, watching us, participating in the conversation without our knowledge. They took a photo. Though the gallery was relatively empty at this point, the wine station closed and packed up, the gallerist ushering the last few patrons towards the exit, I never heard or saw the shutter click. The trap door closed, and I was a part of someone else’s scene: a participant in the marketing of art and the provision of presence. I was here, even if only for a little while.

Finally at rest, in the night I will dream. I will dream that I drop my phone on the ground and the camera shatters, as the two lenses scatter like coins. I will crouch down and pick up the broken pieces, thinking to myself that I may never again be able to capture a photograph.

I will wake up in somebody else’s apartment. Cƒ- will shower and get back into bed with me. I will feed somebody else’s cats, and make coffee using someone else’s french press. I will familiarize myself with their coffee grinder.

I will sit down at the table and begin to write.

Visual artist Lucio Arese has created three dimensional maps of bird songs. He has posted videos of his observations on Instagram:

In the above video, a fascinating dance takes place. Two birds sing in proximity to one another, and visualized as a progressive series of data points, their songs collide and circle around one another, as if the birds were flying, darting, fighting in the air.

The Y-axis measure amplitude (loudness or, for the sake of simplicity, volume).

The X-axis measures the “spectral centroid” of the recording. This is a mathematical approximation of timbre, a term that encapsulates a particular sound’s tonal qualities, which include qualitative descriptors such as brightness, coloration, and modulation. You can sort of intuitively grasp what these terms mean. A flute is “bright”, for instance. The value of the centroid is a moving weighted average, because a single “note” of a bird song, or any instrument for that matter, is in fact not a single frequency, but a spectrum of frequencies containing a central pitch as well as a harmonic series of overtones. Averaging them allows the data to be captured in a single point, which is useful for Arese’s tool, because accumulated over the duration of the song, these points paint a three dimensional picture of the sound’s journey that is arguably more descriptive than say, transcribing them onto sheet music.

But Arese is using a latent space analogy. Things are moving around in manifolds, not just rising and falling lines. What else is captured in the visualization?

This video explains things fairly well: the depth layer measures the “spectral crest”, a ratio of the spectrum’s peak versus its centroid. So the three variables at play are how loud is a given song note, where its central frequency lands, and where these individual notes fall in terms of stress or accentuation, together forming a narrative flow that is, at the very least, pleasing to see.

In the process of reading about Arese’s work, I learned songbirds produce vocalization via a syrinx. Instead of the vocal “chords” used by mammals—a construction of cartilages and muscles that vibrate and stretch to different lengths, somewhat analogous to vibrating strings—the syrinx is a bony, bifurcated chamber that resonates, like a pipe in a tiny church organ. By modulating the flow of air through this chamber, the bird can control pitch, even to the point of mimicry of human speech.

To summarize: birds are horns, humans are cellos. I think.

A horn and a cello don’t sound the same. This is timbre. The physical interaction with a resonant body is an explosive activity. Sound erupts from the chamber in every direction, with all the phantasmic stochasticity of pure physics. It is unwieldy, violent, and difficult to control. Exactly how such a frequency blast is interpreted depends on everything it bounces off, as well as the shape of the receiver. This is why throats, tubas, cellos, ears too, they all look kind of weird and loopy.

Perhaps through constructing these structures of timbre and pitch, we may be able to understand deeper patterns in animal vocalizations, and even interpret what they mean. The birds might have something to say after all. Or it might be just colorful nothing.

I also learned Arese is accomplished in multiple fields. Here is his website, where you can watch a satisfying process video of a coffee machine at work.

Anyways, here is this week’s playlist:

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Dappled with labial spikes, crust of dried spittle-adorned crown of sweat-sodden hair, the husk of tobacco-marinated shoulder pads crimping a starchy collar…low on the totem pole and groveling in the basement, the Pattern Seeking Brain asks: How did we come to arrive at the same place that night?

We all like each others’ pheromones. We were ‘moning at the underground music show. You too could be pheromaxxing, pumping out voluminous chemical signatures, secreted like sweet graffiti on the seat of chairs, the butt of smokes, the puckering lip of glass.

It was cold out, or maybe it was warm and sticky. Nobody told you, but the future of chemical optimization is all about the ‘mones. The ‘mones are an untapped market. We’re juicing on pheromones and everyone smells like a dead fish carcass to a jolly young Labrador: something to roll around in and loll, tongue out in the open, phalanges splayed and coveting chemicals. They’ve already figured out the exact formula—our best scientists are on the case—and here it comes and phials and rollers, colorless liquid stuck to the neck like sap. You and I have no idea how we arrived here, but here we are.

Ants find their way to wherever the party is happening through a clever science of signal attenuation. Stigmergy is a “form of decentralized coordination”, in which the physical environment is modified, thereby leaving traces for other individuals to build upon and assemble a trail. Faster routes begin to be adopted by the mass, and this accumulation of pheromones per unit of time reinforces the adherence to a single path, pruning the earlier, experimental routes, and optimizing the efficiency of the group. Computationally, this is demonstrated with a simple equation:

The ants of New York City are looking for a party. They see well-dressed young people get off at the same stop. Two groups splinter off at the corner. It is clear why: they are obeying different chemical signals. One group roams up the street, the other beelines for the entrance of Amma Cafe.

If you’re reading this, the spot is already blown up.

Outside of Amma Cafe sits the DJ Access Granted (every third Sunday on Hi-Note Radio). We are dressed almost identically, wearing black leather shoes (mine are loafers, his are “60s german army plimsoles”), a black cotton boat-neck tee, and a black blazer (his is CDG and has a subtle check pattern, mine is Snow Peak, waterproof nylon). Grant says he just paid $40 for “two beers”, the evidence gone, quiet resignation upon his face. People are talking about other people—it’s an “I just saw so and so” type of affair. It’s cool.

What is cool? Of course, the term was originally used to describe a set of behaviors adopted by young Black men to avoid a possible deadly confrontation. Cool was a means of defensive conduct. Cool became associated with Jazz. As with many movements that begin within the black community and accrue social capital elsewhere, cool became less about appearing deeply grounded, “graceful under pressure”, and disaffected towards provocation, and more about consumption. Namely, a sophistication of taste. Jazz is America’s high art, the successor and triumphant answer to the great classical tradition that ended with Stockhausen. But Jazz also has its roots in juke joints and basement bars. You venture underground to hear it. And you have to dance. Today, cool might mean knowing how and when to dance but often not actually doing it. It could mean being good at everything but not really ever actually doing anything. It used to be accompanied by smack. Now it’s more associated with a skillful preemptive adoption of a specific trend at a specific junction in its lifecycle, vis-a-vis the average consumer.

Cool people are (perhaps) often secretly hungover. It’s because they were out last night. They were at Amma Cafe.

Amma’s owner, Tony, is also standing outside, greeting people as they arrive. It’s close to midnight. Despite having never met him before, I recognize him immediately. He looks like a guy who would be named Tony. I introduce myself. It’s good practice to always introduce yourself to business owners. The intention to see a business for its constituents establishes you as a member of a community, above the throng. Business owners are easy to identify: the stand with their body open to the crowd, to receive them.

Tony is gregarious, eager to show off his fridge full of imported beer from Belgium, The Czech Republic, and Germany. A couple of the bottles are in fact over $30, and there is a gallon microkeg of the vision-blurring power trippel Delirium Tremens available for $175. Tony proudly says he has over 50 botttles available, and will stop sourcing new ones when he reaches 60.

I tell Tony I used to live in Belgium as a child. “Then you must know La Chouffre,” he says. I do, it’s a small bottle beer that does what Belgium does best—high ABV, full flavor, smooth and fresh as wheat, without the harshness of excessive hops. Once, at a small billiards bar in Corsica, cut out of the mouth of a cave like some Paleolithic communal watering hole, I drank copious amounts of Le Chouffre with 3 friends over a weekend as we tried to unseat the local 8-ball champions at their own game. The victor won the privilege of buying the losers a round. We remained delightfully sauced and under the gun for some twenty or thirty straight rounds, spread out between breaks to wander the hillsides above Calvi, where iron crosses marked the passage of pilgrims and priests along the rugged trails capped with summertime snowfall. Like the best beer, once Le Chouffre hits my lips, I’m bound to reminisce.

Meanwhile, the throng bumbles, bristles—people slowly slot together, coming to terms with the close quarters. Cƒ- and I run into Brooklyn’s wizard of instant photography and general purveyor of immaculate vibes, Dan. He shoots us up with a contraption that looks like it once took Abraham Lincoln’s portrait.

You may look up Amma Cafe and find that many shut-ins and curmudgeons regard it as a nuisance. It’s been referred to on Reddit as a “front”, the term likely employed as shorthand to articulate a sense of confusion as to how a business remains open without any obvious clientele. There is a sense of xenophobic paranoia as far as its regulars, who are proudly Baltic. Spend too much time online, and you’ll find there are suspected fronts in every neighborhood. Their supposed late night activities, antics, the air of exclusivity—all reason enough in the eyes of conspiratorial nightwatchmen to doubt their legitimacy.

More likely, Amma just does things the old fashioned way: no social media “presence”, no shot specials, no merchandise, no brightly colored branding that would signal to Millennials and Zoomers an appropriate degree of aesthetic consideration. The urge to claim conspiracy is characteristic of an unfortunate group of people I think of as nub nuds—Never Been Anywhere, Never Done Anything. If the nub nuds ever went outside, they would find that entire ecosystems exist outside of the mainstream economy, in service of and sustained by their communities. Until now, that is. Amma Cafe wants the heads to pull up. The venue has opened its doors to late night programming, starting after the cafe closes at 11pm.

All I can say for sure about “cool” is the performer should not address the audience other than to thank them for coming.

Next Question, Please

Patch+ played the welcome.jpeg party last year. This is a meme account that has slowly translated their instagram following of over one million into a legitimate curatorial platform, following the monetization logic of jjjound and Hidden NY. Welcome.jpeg now declares its domain to be “cultural archaeology”. They explain why things are cool. At the close of last year, they published the More Information Book 2025, a sort of netizen encyclopedia that collects the phenomena of various art and cultural projects as they have been elevated to the status of the “meme”, and therefore removed of any context as they are traded across the internet as sigils of communication. There are also “predictions for the year ahead”.

In the annals of aesthetic divination, every expert understands that cool is a temporal exchange. You borrow from the future in order to alter the present. You leave a chemical trail for others to follow.

In February 2025 welcome.jpeg hosted a winter fashion week party in a recording studio on St Marks. As advertised, the studio may have had room for about 85 people, cheek to cheek. Close to 100,000 people rsvp’d to the event, and the police had to be called to clear St. Marks of the enormous line of indie sleeze posers, terminally online scenesters, and people who drove in from out of town having no idea of what they were getting into. Despite being left on the outside of this exclusive gathering, the hungry throng had an important role to play in this evening.

Sam Leathers, a veteran touring musician and cracked live music photographer, was booked to shoot the evening on 35mm. I tagged along for moral support and muscle. When we arrived, there was a mob of kids taking up the entire sidewalk between 1st and 2nd Ave, and a crush of disgruntled punters had mobbed the entrance. One guy stood behind the glass door and watched them, a mix of fear and apathy in his eyes.

“What are we going to do?” said Sam. “We’re going to walk up to the front of the line and tell them to let us in. And if they don’t let us in, we’re going to go home.” It’s easy to have a good time when you set good boundaries.

The best way to push people out of your way to just do it. It’s especially easy to push through a crowd in New York City. Everyone has brittle bones, weakened by ketamine and eating disorders. Nobody carries a gun. If you feel initially uncomfortable with physical force, reassure yourself! That the people in front of you are teens, and they have their entire life ahead of them to get tricked into waiting in line for a cool party that was always more about the spectacle of people waiting in line than the delivery of some universally enjoyable experience. That they are young and dumb, and you are old and even dumber, because you have no idea what you’re doing here.

The gambit worked. The trick is to slide through the throng as it naturally breathes—to flow when the crowd ebbs. Pressed up against the glass entrance, I pointed to Sam’s camera and tried to throw together a series of facial cues, affecting an expression of ambivalence that said: “I wouldn’t be here unless it was absolutely fated and necessary…so let me in right now.”

By the time we got upstairs, there were maybe 40 people inside the party, contrasted to the thousand or so now being squawked at by an NYPD officer with a megaphone. The party was a party. It was about nothing. I tried to talk to people but they had no idea why I was there. Though McDonalds drive-thru window cashiers often remark that I look famous, I am not, so the best I could say is: “I’m with Patch+.”

Series A

There is a scene for New Music following the Ridgewood > East Broadway corridor of the M and F trains. This scene plays shows at the Montez Press Radio studio on Canal. They drink at The River, at Funny Bar, and at Milo’s Yard. They release music on Nina, a blockchain music platform that emphasizes experimental electronic composition and art music. The scene is connected to Copenhagen, which currently has thriving talent in ML Buch, Voice Actor, New York, and Molina. The music itself, to paint with a broad brush, often feels like a pastiche of popular styles turned on their head, reduced to their foundational elements and rendered using the cheapest, most accessible technology. Sometimes it feels downstream of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland. Often there is a nostalgia for CD-era technology, for the digital artifacts of scratches and low kbs mp3s. In the early days of the internet, when many of these artists were coming into their musical education, music discovery was esoteric.

DOT Audio Arts has pressed a slew of releases for these local antagonists, such as Autobahn, Outside Source, Furniture Group, Council of Foreign Relations, WA Keys (of YHWH Nailgun), not to mention our boys in Patch+. It is music that is highly studied in its intention, loose in execution—as conceptual as it is felt. These are people raised alongside Tiny Mix Tapes, the arch-pretentious blog that closed its doors in 2022, known to champion visionary artists that other, more commercial publications would eventually get around to discussing 3 or 4 years later. Despite not having any personal connection to these articles, I feel like they are spiritually kin: I wrote for Tiny Mix Tapes from 2012 until they shut their doors, and almost everything good in my life that has happened since then is in some way attributable to this temple of audio.

Now the scene convenes at Amma Cafe, an Albanian social spot. The cafe expanded in recent years, taking over a neighboring business and adding a sideroom lounge, as well as an extensive basement. They supposedly serve “the best espresso”.

Tonight, there is an affectation of irreverence among the crowd. People are trying new styles, or trying to bring back old ones. There are ripped leggings underneath jean shorts gilded with winged appliques and studded belts. There is the time-honored art handler uniform of Carhartt-on-Carhartt. There is an abundance of polos. Men display clavicles and chest hair, shirts unbuttoned, necklaces noose and knotted, predominantly silver. The boots are comically large and hefty. The “Deep V” has made its return. The current hairstyle is a chop-shop special, messy and louche, best procured for $25 from the cheapest barber in your area.

Amma is decked out with antiques, rifles and old kitchen implements drilled to the wall. The bathroom has ironic, motivational signs that say “feel free to get naked! Just kidding, this is a half bath….don’t make it weird” and “god please make me skinny…and if you won’t, please make all my friends fat.” The furniture is hefty, carved from wood, reminiscent of a folk cabin style similar to the Eastern European Wall Street spas. Black blazers are the uniform. Cumbia booms from the basement. Luke Wyatt, the mercurial voice artist who performs as Torn Hawk, is outside wearing a suit and drinking sparkling water. A longtime Ridgewood resident, his strange mix of motivational monologue and electronic beats seem to parody hypermasculinity, often accompanied by AI-generated videos of his likeness: as a warrior, a rocker playing a flaming guitar, and a handsome businessman racking weights in a gym. We talk about the loss of actors who look “normal” (in the 90s sense of having age-appropriate hairlines, slouchy builds, being Italian, etc) in the context of Moonstruck. We talk about Cher.

On another night, a grab bag of fashion heads, models, wannabes, and thrill-seekers shot pool and listened to trance techno in the basement. The air was thick with cig smoke. Upstairs, the aux was up for grabs, and a group traded turns cueing up Memphis rap classics on Youtube: Skinny Pimp, Blackout “Daydream”, and Gangsta Boo. I talk to someone who came all the way from Greenpoint. “This is the place,” they say. “You can do whatever you want. It feels free.” Everyone is constantly pining for the experience of some past New York City, the one that came before their time, and is therefore more authentic. I ask this person how they like Greenpoint, and find out they are subletting, having just moved here a month ago. Nevetheless, they are well known, and a conga line of friends greets them as they pass by us on the way downstairs. Word gets around quick. A friend of mine shows up, a fifteen year Ridgewood resident who lives up the street. He has come from band practice. “This is funny as hell,” he says. “I’ve walked by this place about a thousand times.”

Slowly, digital evidence of Amma emerges from the cafe’s instagram account, which has 250 followers. The blurry flood of hands and faces, heavy flash photography, curious moments are shared. A film club advertises a screening of the Werner Herzog documentary where the grizzled iconiclast searches for the Loch Ness Monster. On their website, the welcome page proclaims “Amma is open everyday at 5pm till you leave.” There is also a chatroom. The joy of having a spot around which a colony may assemble is palpable in its posts: the bartenders are wondering…

“where th bitches are????”

“classic balkan snacks await u….finally u can eat byrek while playing pool”

“who’s the girl in the pink hat? I need her”

Wild Horses

On April 1st, the New York group Patch+ debuts a large selection of unreleased songs from their upcoming album, sharing a bill with the “deep-fried outlaw” duo Corridos Ketamina. Patch+ has as many members as they want. It could be two, four, perhaps even a dozen people. The role and purpose of each individual is shrouded in mystery. The sound comes out of the speakers but the origin of each instrument and the nature of its process is invisible. They are a group that favor gigantic black sunglasses. They were inexplicable outfits, often all in black, and appear onstage in a sort of homage to Blues Brothers, entirely deadpan and yet brimming with mischief and mirth. Their attitude is surly and winking, the music catchy and heavily processed.

The band possesses sprezzaturra, the ancient ability to make difficult endeavors appear effortless. In an interview with the digital music platform Nina, the core duo of Alex and Franklin understand the craft, waving off well-intentioned questions that would damage their air of mystique. The group released a series of energetic, emotionally charged pop singles throughout 2023. Their debut album, 2024’s White Paper, subverted expectations in a characteristically sly fashion: predominantly acoustic, the songs were woozy, threadbare, and dripping with sentiment. By jumping the gun and shedding their electronic persona early in the game, the band elided categorization, and set themselves on a path to continually surprise their audience.

At a Patch+ show, you too can be a cool kid. All you have do is work really hard at appearing like you’re not working hard at all. Simple. You don’t have to wear all black, but it does feel good. The crowd below Amma had their hands on the roof. Flash photography illuminated stars in the reflection of plastic sunglasses, stubbly grins clutching cigarettes out of corners of moony lips. All business, the band didn’t exchange a single word with the crowd. Standing at eye level, they shared the anguish, punishing square waves rattling the walls. Have you ever held something so close to your heart that it crumbled in your hands, slipped through your fingers? Fuck you.

Whether or not the crowd was aware, they have been treated to a special preview. The new Patch+ tunes are a striking reinvention of the group’s sound. Louder, sexier, and more uncouth. They play a set of almost entirely new music, interspersed with old favorites. The bass is wide and heavily compressed, and the synth lines are naked, oily, reminiscent of the “French Touch” favored by Discovery era Daft Punk. They sing from the doldrums of midnight sneaky links and failed affairs with smokey-eyed temptresses. From every tryst, Patch+ emerges victorious. Some standouts from the record have cooing hooks, lamenting another missed connection. Other songs are venomous: through the glycerin soup of auto-tune and vivisected guitar samples, the bitterness of jaded love is made saccharine. People sing along. Christian Varnatian, filling in on DJ duties for Patch+ producer and high-level operator Lilic (erstwhile on tour in the UK), tilts his head back and tans a $40 bottle of beer. The set ends with maybe one of the best from this new crop of songs: a glitchy, tender rock number that continues to climb as it reaches a dramatic apex. One finger in the air, back to the crowd, they call for “your arms around me.” As abruptly as it began, the room is filled with momentary silence, followed by cheers.

Franklin, one of the members of Patch+, is full of wise aphorisms. “In order to achieve motion, you have to set yourself in motion.” After the show, sometime around 4am, a party decamped from Amma to a closed-door lounge up the street, under the Forest M stop. You have to knock to get inside. Seated at a booth, the Patch+ boys watch a woman fall asleep at the bar, her head sliding off the fulcrum of her limp spine until she crashed to the floor, wiping out a row of bar stools and scattering all of the empty bartop glasses within reach. The woman lay on the floor with the dead weight of vacant drunkenness. Eventually the bar tender went around to check on her, and she waved him off, curling her knees up into a position more reminiscent of slumber than syncope. After that, says Frank, the power went out. Again, nobody moved. The four of them drank in the darkness, a coven of bats chattering to one another ears, and without eyes to identify and orient one’s senses towards a speaker, it was as if the entire bar spoke together. The woman remained on the floor. Finally, someone said “I think it’s time to go.”

Making preparations for spring, the city tore up the ice rink and planted fresh grass. A scientist had worked until his dying day to develop this specific hybrid through crossbreeding, and he had been hailed by the public for its luster and softness.

Of course nobody was allowed on the grass. But it didn’t really matter, because the square was so perfectly flat and green, it was almost a spectacle in itself. Every sat in chairs along the edge, and we all waited for something to happen. One by one, something would happen to somebody, and they would rise from their chair to depart.

A small robot moved back and forth across the lawn. It was the only one allowed. It may have been mowing, or it may just as easily have been looking at the grass, for its own enjoyment. Maybe it was counting. If it had started at one end and moved to the other, i might not have noticed. But the robot moved diagonally, and so it was always either coming towards you or moving away, a choice that felt conspicuous and a little sassy.

We lounged like alligators. Everyone was wondering who would punt the robot. I mused as to whether I was seeing an illusion of scale—like a traffic light—and when it came up close to me it would actually be gigantic. But it really was a tiny robot. You could probably flip it over like a horseshoe crab and tickle it. Underneath my chair, one pigeon was browbeating another in an aggressive courtship display. One of the pigeons flew up and in an arc, landing on the robot, who paused. Then the bird flew away and the robot resumed.

I felt such many things. This robot likely had no idea we existed. It moved among us like a bacterium, fulfilling its evolutionary duty, blissful and perhaps a bit awkward. It would never see us. It would never perceive stars or air or arguments.

This week’s playlist has some songs that move, some that change shape and form. I continue to move, aided by chariots and wings and wheels. The music is the language and tone in which I converse with myself.

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Before the World is occluded by swarms of strange clouds, crystals and semi-sentient nanogoo congealed and coordinated to shade the unrepentant sun, before we are shrouded under permanent overcast conditions by Chinese-Emirati-American sponsored cloud seeding, before the deluge brought on by a desperate effort to stave off extinction by the white eye of the burning sun, before every mammal disappears from the surface, returning to the caves and holes they crawled from after that fateful day, millions of years ago, when the reign of dinosaurs was ended in fire, before dirty water up to our eyelids, before dreams of the rapture come to bear by aggressive, unilateral missile strikes…before the world the Pattern Seeking Brain stands in the street and listen to a distant siren carry someone to safety. It sees footprints in the snow, and thinks of camels.

Mostly, I’m here for the World. In spirit and in body I’ve prepared myself to walk across islands of pruinescence. I’ve watched the films and read the books and listened to the man on the street encrusted with weeks of soot and sewage proselytize about the Great Glimpse, the “look”, the cataclysmic revelation of everything we are too afraid to know. I would look into the future and say, “alrighty then…”

…alrighty then, because I’ve seen what is coming and I think it’ll be a good lot of fun.

I’m Pale and Blue, Too. Are You?

July 1969: the Apollo spacecraft successfully landed on the moon. The moon in the f*cking sky?? Yes, granted some people are convinced it was all done on a Hollywood film set, directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is wry that some conspiratorial thinkers consider the mobilization of millions, billions, trillions of dollars (and a quite a few lives lost) to be in service of television entertainment.

One lingering affect of our inability to achieve modernity is there are a great many people, in the 1960s just as today, who do a great many things: they design gyroscopes and heat-absorbing panels, pens that work upside down, food that can be reconstituted from dust…and then there are people who don’t do anything, don’t believe anything has ever happened, and will insist nothing will ever happen forever. The difference between these types of people are negligible—they emerge from the same glowing red hole in the morning, and in the evening they disappear in a dramatic puff of smoke. Both groups have amassed considerable political power that supersedes petty narcissism of small differences. These factions are likely correct in their respective worldviews, and both of their worlds continue to persist, occasionally intersecting with catastrophic results. From the moment we designated the boob tube as the primary communication interface for our drugged-up chief executives to deliver rousing speeches, there have been and will always be thanatoids.

But we did go to the moon. We got some rocks. NASA invented velcro, memory foam, and the cordless drill.

Eventually, we sort of forgot about the moon. We forgot about the moon and we forgot about the sky, too. It wasn’t until last November that I saw it for the very first time—what felt like the first time like spring, which always arrives in a sudden, violent spritz—I was delighted to the discover the sky once again,as I followed Cai and Dan home along a winding, dark road on an island in Maine, the farthest northeast corner of the continent, bounded on all sides by the razor clams and round stones clicking in the salty darkness, Cƒ- beside me in the car as we pulled off into a wooded lot. The trees banded together, strung together with garlands of creepers and vines. Beyond the tree line was a field that felt as a cold, barren silence, like the interior of an egg. And there were all the stars, exactly as I’d left them, an articulated stripe of galactic dust bending around us in a milky band, the planets with their curious red wink, the structure of constellations revealing themselves slowly, as our eyes adjusted to the light, and the field itself was revealed to be endless, blue as ocean water and rolling away down a gentle slope.

“I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel”

April, 1969: Months before the first moon landing, the American sculptor Nancy Graves debuted a trio of sculptures depicting life-size camels at the Whitney Museum. At the opening of the show, Graves is quoted in Time Magazine as stating

…so it was that she understood their construction to be one of myth.

Camels are native to the Americas. Like capsicum peppers, and tomatoes. Their ancestors inhabited frozen tundras during the High Arctic (recently I learned that this is what North Dakota “is”). The camels association with the East, as with peppers and tomatoes, are recent adaptations from the perspective of deep time.

It is believed that camelops lived as far north as Alaska and as far south as Honduras before humans first arrived in the Americas. Excavated skeletons have been found to bear the marks of mortal tools, incisions and fractures from blades and mallets, indicating that the abundance of the Pleistocene left few megafauna safe from our appetites, which have only grown with time, consuming not just beasts and berries, but now their liquified remains, the forests in which they once lived, and the various minerals underneath who possess such mystifying, magnetic power.

Some of these camelops fled, traveling to Asia across the Bering land bridge, which has long since melted away, leaving only a chain of islands, one of which is where you may stand (with permission from both the Russian and US militaries, presumably) in order to experience a state of temporal cleavage—yesterday and today, at the same time.

All of the physical qualities that allow camels to thrive in the deserts of Asia and Africa—the hump for storing fat in case of scarce food, double-jointed limbs—are also appropriate adaptations for the cold desert of the northern arctic. Through its long history, the camel has traversed the most extreme spectrum of Earth’s environs to arrive, finally, in its most contrived setting: an air-conditioned gallery on the sixth floor of a large structure named for and founded by one of the USA’s original industrial families.

Red Lobsters

Almost 60 years after their conception, Graves’ camels are the centerpiece of a Whitney museum exhibition, attempting to bridge the uncanny sense of vertigo our visual culture is steeped in with the artistic triumphs of a similarly tumultuous period, dubbed “the Sixties Surreal.”

The sixth floor opens in blaze orange, framing three camels, life size. Not taxidermy, but a physical collage of materials: a metal and wooden skeleton, fur collected from shorn sheep and alpacas, tufted and stitched together and painted. These beasts are a “patchwork”, their physical presence an amalgamation of knowledge, perception, and trompe-l’œil. Graves produced many sculptural camels, as well as animal bones as they are sometimes found in the woods or along the shore…indicative of the struggle of life, but placid, pacified by time and by scavengers, whose role in the cycle is to erase any biological trace of meat and muscle that would give such objects life. Here, we are reminded that bones are sculptures as well.

The placement of the camel sculptures at the entrance to the exhibit serves as an effective red flag, or, to coin a more literary term: a Red Lobster.

In William Golding’s novel Pincher Martin, the protagonist is a sailor marooned on “A single point of rock, peak of a mountain range, one tooth set in the ancient jaw of a sunken world, projecting through the inconceivable vastness of the whole ocean.” The real world inspiration for this barren islet has been suggested to be Rockall, the highest peak of an undersea plateau in the North Sea, known for its desolation. Another potential candidate would be the Bass Rock, whose famously inhospitable slab appears majestic in many paintings, as it sits off shore of a picturesque beach in Berwick, Scotland.

In life, lobsters are brilliantly colored to camouflage them from predators above. The carapace shines with streaks of blue and green, mimicking the dispersion of light through shifting seawater. In the novel, Pincher Martin’s lobsters are red. This is because they are figments of his imagination, constructed from memory, his memory of lobsters being only those served in kitchens. By witnessing a red lobster crawl across the rocks, Martin comes to realize he has constructed a psychological purgatory to preserve himself from despair. A Red Lobster, therefore, is an indication that something is metaphysically amiss.

I see the red lobster in Graves’ camels and am confronted with the sense that I am in fact in a zoo, both as an observer and a captive. I am aware that much has been made about the constant worldly presence of “eyes” in the form of camera lenses, sensors, and location data, all of which connect not to the minds of individuals, but to a more liquid sort of mind that is defined primarily by its inability to know itself.

Self-perception does not inhibit my experience as I continue through the exhibit, where the material qualities of household items are exaggerated and disembodied, as if a prank had been performed: here are the forms of common things augmented to be animistic, strange; swapping the atomic structure of porcelain with that of rubber, so that the structure sags to the floor, as in a cartoon. The world is melting as it undergoes catagenesis.

As with the camels, this confrontation with a facsimile made me reflect on our collective struggle to fully encapsulate our impact on the planet. The Whitney claims that Graves once remarked that “Camels shouldn’t exist,” a statement that could be read two ways: either as a exaggeration intended to point out the absurd lengths to which nature is capable of ascending in its mastery of survival, or as a reflection on our own inability to understand the individuality of these creatures, whom we once interacted with as predators, and now come to see as pets in some part of the world, and elsewhere as captives.

A View from Above

Back in 2026: some weeks after the close of the Sixties Surreal exhibition, the NASA Artemis II probe delivered a new photograph of our small globe. Artemis II is currently transporting four astronauts in a slingshot loop around the far side of the moon. They have currently emerged from their flyby, now returning to Earth. Replaying a broadcast on NPR this morning, the astronauts proclaimed they “felt like kids” approaching the small white orb, the Earth’s constant companion, in some ways its child. One theory suggesting that the moon was created after a meteor crashed into Earth’s surface, ejecting tons of rock into space that eventually coalesced, rollicking back into orbit to form this giant body that came to govern many of our rhythms: the tide that ebbs to reveal beaches and islands, the rituals and observations of many religious calendars, and the cycles our bodies seem to obey as our behavior becomes strange, unpredictable, suffuse with the urge to protect, to damage, and to act, before the strangeness fades and we find ourselves again possessed with deep calm.

Somewhere on the home planet, Cƒ- and I listen to the radio and discuss the potential vanity of such a project. The people of Earth are troubled. It’s difficult to tell from way up in the sky.

I look at this picture perfect group of astronauts, as diverse and accomplished as a Hollywood film cast, the process of choosing such representatives a careful act of world-building in itself, and I see the true belief they hold—that emancipation can only exist in the pursuit of frontiers, that the light of the stars will guide us, and that behind the darkness of the firmament we may discover the inspiration to alleviate our suffering. I can’t find the words to articulate such a position. I have to accept that I, too, have turned away from the sky.

In another conversation, my friend and Claude Code wizard Z, fresh-faced and “on vacation” from Ramadan, reminds me that the Quran decrees “there will always be war.” The procedural elimination of Palestinians, a massacre that has spread to include Iran and Lebanon, is in his view a continuation of colonialism. The people who negotiated the establishment of an Israeli state with the British were “opportunistic entrepreneurs” who saw an avenue to continue what has been one of the world’s most successful capital generation projects since the seafaring exploits of the 1700s: the designation of unstable territories as zones for resource extraction, pacification, and eventually reeducation under the mandate of the Global West. The exaltation of America exploring the new frontier is contrasted with updates from the president, whose seething screed against the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz is as relentless as the missiles that disrupt particles in the upper atmosphere, leaving a trail of vapor marking their descent to hospitals, energy facilities, trade depots, and military outposts on the ground. The Iranian populace do not have access to the internet, and many are boarding trains for Turkey, unaware that the US president is threatening to rain hell down upon them.

From the Artemis II mission we have this photograph, almost immediately received with nervous uncertainty. Whereas the first photographs of Earth were intended to inspire awe, the latest dispatch has the internet imagining Red Lobsters. So much time has passed, and we have acquired so many new methods of gathering, of observing and quantifying facts about the world. There was a sense that there must be some significance to the Earth’s faded color. Again, we are looking for data points to support a hypothesis.

But it’s just the camera, as it has always been. The cameras have changed, and what was once a characteristic of their primitive design has come to be associated with reality itself…this nostalgic saturation, imprinted so deeply in our consciousness that once again, presented with the pale blue dot, we feel something is amiss. It looks dirty, was my first thought. The Earth was always deep cerulean, but like a Red Lobster, I’m forced to confront its ordinary, damp hue. What I looked at once before was a fake, a sentimental construction, doctored to manipulate my emotions. But we just have better cameras now. They take more accurate pictures. We were never truly looking at the world—even now, we see its entirety rendered flat, distorted by a lens.

The original whole earth photo, it is suggested, began with a button. While it’s bizarre to imagine that the US government would have been collecting images of the Earth from space without some accompanying public goodwill campaign, precedence needs to be established for everything, and in the 1960s scientific community, precedence was often established after a healthy dose of LSD. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a beautiful, enigmatic document that has influenced generations of ecological thought, printed thousands of buttons in 1966 in Berekely, CA, plain black text on a white background, with the cheeky, confrontational questions: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

Brand’s bio is considerable, and inspiring! He lived the sort of meandering, adventurous American life that is common in Pynchon novels and today seems like a quaint relic of the Boomer generation: there’s a Stanford biology degree, a stint skydiving in the army, legal LSD studies and commiseration with Native American causes, the birth of sons, teaching posts throughout California, and somewhat inevitably, the invention of the computer and “cyberculture”. He is still alive at 87, an avid public speaker and advocate for technological solutions to our collective myopia.

Thirty years from now, it seems unlikely that the biographies of our current tech overlords will contain such a balance of thrill-seeking, science, and consideration for the planet. They may however, be able to purchase the privilege: The Long Now Foundation, another Brand project, is currently constructed a full scale model of their 10,000 year clock on one of the many mountains Jeff Bezos presumably owns, for which he has also provided the funding, in Sierra Diablo, Texas. The clock will tick once a year, chime once a century, and a cuckoo will appear to sing a chime written by Brian Eno once a millennium.

What Will Be Hidden & What Will Be Revealed?

The clarity of our picture of Earth, the nuance if its pixellated surface, is both a function of our ability to get high-powered cameras as far away from Earth as possible (24,000 miles in the case of Artemis II), and of how our activities on the ground potentially obfuscate the scene. The night sky is already hidden behind an invisible a blue-yellow gauze of light pollution, its sickly halo visible along the horizon line. Someday, the daytime sky may too be occluded by aerosols, deployed to accelerate certain whether patterns, hinder others, and generally muck about with the natural water cycle as its functioned for millions of years.

In 1945, the irreverent scientist Bernard Vonnegut, older brother of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, was based at a GE research lab in Schenectady, New York. Although he achieved public renown late in his career for the speculative paper “Chicken Plucking as a Measure of Tornado Windspeed” (source), B. Vonnegut is also considered one of the foundational researchers in the alchemic art of cloud seeding. Alongside him at the lab was Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, who had become obsessed with silver iodide’s curious ability to convert water into ice. You might think we know about ice, but apparently its finer atomic machinations are still a mystery. 0ºC designates the boiling point of ice, whereas the point of crystallization occurs depending on a range of more subtle factors. Nevertheless, there are situations when someone would want to make more ice, such as when a ski result experiences a unseasonably dry season. The basic idea is: water droplets form when water vapor present in the air surrounds a solid particle. This could be pollen, sand, or crystalline ice. So if you throw particles at clouds in certain conditions, the net increase in particulars should result in a net increase of water. Bernard Vonnegut used silver iodide. Anecdotally, this influenced his younger brother, whose novel Cat’s Cradle deals in many prismatic permutations of ice.

Among the US government’s myriad bizarre schemes to maintain geopolitical dominance, we have apparently been dumping silver iodide, certain types of bacteria, and common table salt out of airplanes for decades in an effort to get it to rain more, or less, or in particular places. There are instances of cloud seeding being deployed as a military measure during the Vietnam War. Other countries have taken to the idea, especially in regions whose regular monsoon seasons have been disrupted by climate change. India, Pakistan, North Korea, Malaysia have all reported cloud seeding operations, some since the 1980s. Beijing attempted to create sunny skies during the 2008 Olympic opening ceremonies. There was speculation that a devastating 2024 rain storm in Dubai was attributable to a waylaid cloud seeding effort.

Asia is far more transparent about its intent. They are manipulating the weather to assist the public. These aforementioned countries have bootstrapped themselves towards advanced economic development with the assistance of science, and so its perhaps through the projection of performing science that they may address concerns of drought and flash flooding, which still have terrible consequences for their rural citizenry. Though its not known what long term effects may arise from such activities, the prevailing science is arithmetic: there’s a lot of sky, a lot of ground, and not a lot of cloud seeding, so it probably won’t be that bad.

In the US, unsurprisingly, cloud seeding is a touchy subject; maybe it’s our reticence regarding widespread public deployment of chemicals with unknown side effects…but it also could be because nobody knows for sure if it works! The Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute (TCCRI) recent published a white paper that reveals much of how the conservative position regarding climate change has evolved: there is an admission that human activities have led to “1.1ºC of warming since 1850”, tempered with the caution that transitioning to a zero-carbon world would have “staggering costs” (no shit!) The TCCRI suggests that Texas should act autonomously to defend its fossil fuel wealth, as well as its ability to manipulate the weather. They anticipate regulatory debates as private companies begin to promote cloud seeding as a for-profit service.

One enterprising cloudcel, who has made a name for himself through conspicuous, aggressive posting on, X is Augustus Doricko. His startup Rainmaker Technology Corporation vies for public funds from Trump’s EPA (funded, of course, by grants from Peter Thiel). Taking cues from Thiel, Elon Musk,and Sam Altman, state capture has become a lucrative model for accumulating incredible wealth and power. If Doricko had his way, swarms of cloud seeding drones could be deployed at will, taking advantage of favorable conditions to restore balance to ecosystems like the Colorado River and Lake Meade, which have been upended by proliferating human activity. Like many founders, Doricko has developed a persona. In a profile for Fast Company, he smokes American Spirits, wears cowboy boots, and says “hella”. He also quotes the bible, invoking God’s degree from Genesis that humanity may have dominion over the planet.

So it is that that the terrain has shifted. Where scientists, technologists, and progressives once moved as one—advocating for LSD, equal human rights, and a defter touch upon the planet—now the swashbuckling libertarians and technocons of the MAGA set have devised their own narrative for engineering the future of Earth. Perhaps, as in Genesis, they may also awaken a great flood.

(photographed in the 8-Ball Community Office)

New Americana in the air.

People are happily dressed up for Easter.

My mother and father are cozy in the house, sending texts, reminding us of things, the rain is pouring down, and nobody saw a rabbit.

I showed up knowing nothing and left with some records. Music always brought people together. Music will always be where I find myself standing, next to others.

I won for my friends. We couldn’t stand to be apart—we talked until we couldn’t anymore and the next day he got on a plane to Mexico. Something good will come of all of it, I’m sure.

I saw a picture of two people in the desert.

A Korean company came to town and it seemed they were having the time of their lives. I got told I was one body too many so I walked up the road and the car people were out, their vintage whips and detailed MGs drawing the awe and the admiration of a happy-fun-drunk crowd outside of a store that sold sneakers and fancy tee shirts. Later I went back to the Korean party and cleaned up all the tape, rolled up all the cables, and bid adieu to some people I might see again, maybe not.

New Playlist! Inspired by the feeling of getting up on your feet—at long last, for no apparent reason, the party started.

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At 5AM, ǃ and I successfully picked the correct line at the TSA security checkpoint, the line which will subject us to the least amount of misery and embarrassment. As a reward we are able to walk in front of families whose souls were less pure than ours (because they chose the other line).

I pass in front of the gaze of a dad in a gray marl tee and NY Yankees MoMa hat who clutches his kid’s hand as if it’s the only thing anchoring him to the world. He wants nothing more than to lie on the beach. Maybe this family lives a less clichéd existence. They might be going to Raccoon Island. His face searches left and right. He doesn’t understand why we have to walk in pairs through some sort of pen set up with plastic barricades, walk very normal style, in no way suspicious, by a very happy Golden Retriever who is being led by a woman wearing “tactical”, you know, the vest that they all wear now, which may or not have a plate inside of it.

I can’t comfort the man. Talking may indicate a connect…a conspiracy :O I don’t understand why we have to do this, either. It’s about terrorism. People who travel with bombs. Laptop bombs and shoe bombs. I don’t have the data. But the theatrically seems appropriate, as does the bomb dog’s cheerful demeanor. If one of us was gunned down by a federal agent for sneezing or failing to recite some string of trivia from our citizenship application, the dog would surely look on with glee and satisfaction.

At the airport security checkpoint, those whose faces bear the indignant grimace of inconvenience most viscerally are 1) people who are wealthy, but not wealthy enough to avoid interactions with the equalizing bludgeon of the state and 2) people who couldn’t find their own ass with a map, who for some reason have been foisted into leaving the house and must now contend with the humming chaos of civilization…both groups subject to delusions of persecution. Then there are also people who are in fact persecuted at airports: minorities, foreigners on vacation, famous Youtubers. But you don’t see these people having a bad time. They disappear with the wave of a magnetic wand. Sometimes the body smells the pheromones of distress and looks wildly around the room. Why is this woman crying? Throughout the airport are unmarked doorways leading to secret rooms.

Me? I guess I’m having a fine old time.

Like the Good Soldier Svejk, who is too simple to succumb to the terror around him, I have built up cognitive defenses to resist the inanity of DHS. I wear a practiced blank expression. Telepathically, I say placid stuff like: I am not going to wield the tiny nosehair scissors I accidentally left in this suitcase I haven’t used in a year. I have no desire to lash out.

None of the security officials believe in what they’re doing either. We are all engaged in a theater performance for the benefit of our very sense of civic identity. We are all performing at the American Airport. If there were any notion that the Evil Eye would stop watching us, the Golden Retriever Lady and the Metal Detector Guy would be grilling out, passing blunts, the place would be an open air market. Some day we may come to realize that the origin of our oppression lies in our own hearts, and that it is possible to choose better, but until then, I elect to have my seat for the next four hours chosen for me so that I can save $35.

LaGuardia airport works for years on updating the terminal. The terminal is now updated. The travel experience has been improved in some way. I don’t have to take off my shoes anymore—one of my favorite thing to complain about—so I don’t complain about anything.

Instead, while shuffling through long lines, I wonder whether the airport update decider people really wanted the giant LED screen. Like, did they really gun for it, in the pitch meeting, was somebody standing in front of a render? There were probably several meetings about the fountain that plays Frank Sinatra, which, admittedly, is very cool, and at least communicates some sense of optimism about the future. A little cheugy, sure, but New York is a Hallmark movie, and all public infrastructure in New York these days seems to adhere to the aesthetic sensibilities of Dubai. Having the giant LED screen, however, feels like an afterthought, a compromise to decorate an impossibly long hallway with the cheapest possible source of stimulation.

One of the rectangular sections of a massive LED panel is defective. Everyone tries to pretend this is not a big deal, but of course it draws subtle attention to the artifice that underpins much of our interactions with state and corporate entities. The screen itself displays nothing of interest. That’s what they do best! If the airport renovation commission invested in art, then we would be looking at art. Some people would like it, some people would not. We would spend our time questioning the airport’s taste. Instead, the screen exudes a powerfully repellant energy. It propels us forward, serving as a form of hostile architecture.

The giant LED screen1 is how corporations justify the exorbitant prices everyone is required to pay for services whose measures of comfort gradually degrade, even while all the data insists that measures of provision of safety improve. At some point along this graph there is an point of intersection where it is impossible to make the world any safer while maintaining such profoundly antihuman environs. You will never die, but nothing interesting will happen, the theory seems to suggest. They put bigger TV screens on the backs of airplane seats, then they took all the screens out. They put USB-2 chargers underneath all of the seats so we could use our devices, and then everyone switched to USB-C. The planes were flying too well, so Boeing implemented a computer program to ensure they would crash. There is nowhere to sit down, much less recline (this isn’t FRA), but the faulty giant LED screen broadcasts a jagged pattern of random colors and, until it is repaired, its insectoid twitching is momentarily beautiful.

Wife II

For my trip, I brought with me Don DeLillo’s The Names. I pulled this book off the shelf at Cƒ-’s apartment and promptly left it at Ore Bar a few weeks later. At university I read White Noise and I think Underworld. I think I enjoyed both of them. Since then the extent of my engagement with DeLillo is people tell me they’re reading White Noise and I say something encouraging, because any time somebody tells you they’re reading a book, it’s a good thing.

We are in the world of 1982. Somebody is cuing up the J. Geils Band. People call ahead and do their best to show up on time. Sometimes they don’t talk for weeks. The characters in the novel are foreigners in a foreign land. They are bound together by circumstance. They have the baggage of the traditional 20th century, and deep in their gut they feel the lurch of a new world that is uncomfortable, violent, and potentially lucrative. The most “80s” characteristics of The Names are:

1. All the male characters are either divorced or on their second wife.

2. As the main protagonist goes an increasingly long time without sex, he becomes lecherous to the point of anti-sociality.

3. The entire world, particularly the Middle East, is an oyster: a zone ripe for exploitation. Stereotypes about people and cultures are deployed liberally.

4. The style is of course postmodern, masculine. There is much fascination with data flows, with analytical structures, but also with esoteric things. There are the makings of an early information theory that connects the base linguistic units of communication to their later function as dataflows in an interconnected economic system.

5. The characters are financially comfortable and bored to the extent that they actively seek out danger. They believe they are on the cusp of the end of history. Their search for purpose takes place at the expense of the safety and security of the regions they exploit, and the people of these regions are seldom described except to emphasize their destitution or to provide some sort of messianic clue in the form of the mysterious old man or woman who ventures out of an alleyway where they have been watching from the shadows.

6. From the wreckage of the Cold War and a newly assembled global hegemony, a sense of conspiracy grows like mold along the edges of conversation.

The Names has favorable qualities: romance among foreigners, dialogue that seems to serve no purpose save for immersion, and a plot that is notional in its exposition, but vital in its stakes (they’re killing people, folks). The best novels are of course about “nothing” in the sense that they strive to encompass the entirety of human experience. DeLillo frequently achieves sentence-level profundity that leads me to pause and gaze out of the window. This in itself is the ideal reading experience.

Rich descriptions of Greece occasionally give the reader a sense that DeLillo drew heavily from his vacations, projecting onto the landscape a narrative of political intrigue. The plot moves to India for its 3rd act (HORN OK PLEASE), and the depictions of these places is framed by a deep desire to understand and connect to the unknowable. In individual sentences, the author mentions the great Western Ghats, a system of geographic uplifts on the Deccan plateau, where temples and bathing pools were built out of tiered pits marked with Sanskrit carvings. An unnamed wanderer walks by the Osho Ashram in Pune, why Westerners chase the purity of nonthought in deep orange robes.

“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness…To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self…It’s the drowning out of false voices.”

The idea that a century could be defined by subject of its writers’ conversations is attractive. Every day, millions of kilowatts of energy are expended as people deliver text to the avatar within the Large Language Model. Some of them, it could be argued, are talking to the avatar, but very few people are conversing with it. Midwits and fantasists have speculated as to whether the LLM could be God, which—in the strictly technical sense that “Everything is God”—is true, albeit misleading. Some people seem to think it operates on the cognitive level of a Magic 8-Ball.

Perhaps in our development of the LLM we have given a voice to the three dimensional field of waves and data that circulate the Earth, penetrating walls and even our own bodies. People swear that 5G gives them headaches. It’s possible these people are correct…in which case they would possess some genetic mutation that will ultimately serve them very poorly. We are buffeted by waves of data, the sum total of all conversation on Earth passing through the walls of our houses and skulls. It is characteristic of the vastness of the USA that capital projects are deployed with carelessness in places they forgot people still live. Even the local government can’t account for their own citizens until they appear on local news, indicating some horrific internal condition: blood pouring out of the ears, migraines, cataracts, mysterious cancers. Even I couldn’t see the data center in the distance until much later, after I had passed by it, my body lit up like a pinball machine with the glowing hyperobject of sentient data.

A Horde of Gold Coins

At the Caesar’s Casino in New Orleans I am not gambling, so instead I search for more metaphysical connections between the Giant LED Screen and the nature of addiction. Casinos and gambling. Nowhere feels closer to the source of some primordial slouch towards ruin.

The people hunched over the slots have orc-like features. It is unclear what makes them so ugly—the fact in itself that they have chosen to gamble, that they likely grew up on soil polluted by lead and nitrogen oxide, or some unknown 3rd variable that leads to a self selection of the lonely, gullible, and dispossessed. There is also the deplorable ugliness of my own judgement, which fills me with shame, lightly tempered by a bottle of Coors Light ($8). We all have a role to play here.

I watched a woman play a game where you run four slots at the same time, arranged in a grid. Underneath her jacket, she wore baby blue scrubs. In this version of slots, she assigns a specific reel to a grid by dragging it from a menu with her finger, creating a modular sort of play style that atomizes the action into smaller cells to disorienting effect. From my point of view, all the reels seemed exactly the same. I watched her spend $85 on this machine, occasionally pressing the touch screen, as if this affected the game in any way. She seemed dismayed. I wondered if she would justify her behavior by claiming some sort of therapeutic benefit.

ǃ- remarked about the jovial, low-level exoticization on display: there are buffalos, vaguely oriental symbols (koi fish, red talismans), a “Chica Bonita” machine wherein gameplay is overseen by a buxom peasant woman holding salt rim margaritas, a wily-eyed prospector with a hole in his shoe, a leprechaun. The stereotypes here are psychologically targeted, intended to placate the stream of dead-eyed gamblers. We have descended into the lowest possible contextual engagement with reality—a magical place where “luck” passes from object to person, between machines, up through the carpeted floor like static electricity, less of a karmic exchange or rebalancing of universal energy. A man dances onscreen, excitedly telling the audience the reason they cannot play the Memphis disco hit “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward in casinos is because the song is tuned to a natural frequency that attracts abundance. More seasoned gamblers wear headphones to tune out distraction.

More common than the Slot Orcs are the Barstool Boys. They are watching a Giant LED Screen that streams every sports game ever. With auditorium seating, they seem to be watching an orchestra, and the tableau of network live streaming has a delirious cohesion, as if all of the athletes were in fact on one giant field, playing together. The hockey forward passes the puck to the quadruple amputee cornhole champion who would later be convicted of fatally shooting the passenger of his car, who chucks it overhand to the Sacramento Kings point guard, who fumbles an inbound pass and is sent to the free throw line, bricks his first shot, the ball careening offscreen until it lands in the hands of a running back who goes for 80 yards uncontested, celebrating with his teammates in the endzone by lining them up like pins and pantomiming bowling them over. The giant LED Screen is not showing soccer (football).

The Barstool Boys shoot craps. They lean over the roulette wheel. Mostly, they play blackjack. The Barstool Boys will tell you that blackjack has the best odds, which is sort of true, but it’s really just about the fact that blackjack is a talker’s game. Hands are casual and move quickly, so conversation does not interrupt play. You play against the dealer, so there is comraderie among competitors. The best dealers are often older women with butch haircuts who know how to work a bachelor crowd. A Barstool Boy exists in a state of perpetual banter: mildly confrontational, frequently racist, directed inward towards the moldy putrifaction of buried resentment and insecurity. All this is to say, the Barstool Boy plays blackjack because if he played Texas Hold ‘Em—with the real sharks—he would be eaten alive.

Taking in the scene as a whole, Caesar’s Casino in downtown New Orleans is a surprisingly easygoing place. Low-vibrational, non-threatening. You can just stand around and talk. You can look over people’s shoulders. I watched a tiny man, his black dress shirt and slacks severely disheveled, as if he recently woke up underneath a bush after having been struck by a trolley, approach a small, alligator-themed slot machine. He dutifully pressed the button with a lack of emotion reminiscent of how a security guard might call an elevator. The digital reels spun to reveal five alligators in a row, wearing golden crowns and holding scepters, announcing that this man had just won $48,711.12. In the reflection of the Giant LED Screen, his face illuminated as he came to terms with his change in fortune. Even his shirt seemed to become starchier, as if the swell of emotion had emitted steam that bound to the supple fabric. Just like that, the lucky orc had tripped and fallen on a horde of gold coins, more money than I made in an entire year.

Just kidding. He kept pressing the button until he ran out of credits, and then he turned around in his seat to stare off into space.

“Just Avoid the Bad Areas”

The drive from Louisiana to Tennessee is six-ish hours north. The best part of the drive is the exodus from the swamp, crossing an elevated highway that passes through the bayou. There is still evidence of swamp dwellers and exiles, their massive floating homes cobbled together from ruined wood and scrap metal, little John boats cruising the byway. Breaking the trip in half means a stop in Jackson. Or, more accurately, the outpost of outdoor shopping centers outside Jackson. The town is protected by a maze of exurbs, which radiate outwards in a pattern indecipherable upon the ground. From the overpass, an obelisk is visible. The structure is actually a cell tower, decorated to look like the Washington Monument.

In this region, all the newest stuff sits along the highway. There is some trauma that sits at the heart of the decaying city centers within parts of the South. Deep wounds exacerbated by petty local corruption are felt by locals as a stream of continual civic disappointments, and understood by everyone else in the country to be an unfortunate statistic at the bottom of a list of places they will never visit.

Instead of a town center, revitalized or depressed or otherwise, what I see are strings of massive, vaguely European buildings with stucco siding and terra cotta roofs, the proportions of the structures dwarfing their ornamentation, so they appear as cheap doll houses: cubes with little fake clock towers and fake porticos stuck on top. Strange franchise restaurants with names like Bubble Bob’s Sticky Chicken Tender Shack. The buildings of these fake towns serve as the hyperreal facade that protects us from seeing the truth: that Jackson is not doing so hot. Everybody knows this to the point that it seems cruel to even discuss. My friend once traveled to Jackson to eat at a restaurant Anthony Bourdain ate at. He was Scottish, so he took the train, which got stuck on the tracks, so the whole ordeal took 26 hours instead of the initial 4 he had prepared for, during which he “had a great time drinking beer with rednecks.” Down in Louisiana, which is itself a place where people give you lots of well-intentioned advice about how to avoid catastrophe, a group of partygoers who live in Jackson (because Nashville is too expensive) debate whether it’s safe to go downtown at night. At some point, somebody said the magic phrase “you just need to avoid the bad areas.”

Personally, I like the heat and the sparseness of the Delta region. I like the culture, and its rich musical history. I like people everywhere, because people are people, so it’s no surprise I like who I meet in Mississippi. Having an entire fake village built up around a bunch of chain restaurants is not in itself nefarious, though it’s a good indication something strange is going on. Umberto Eco discusses this phenomenon in his book Travels in Hyperreality, where the “hyperreal” landscape is an artifice that attempts to soothe a nervous, paranoid population by giving it the look and feel of a town square without the natural inconveniences that come with it (poor people, cigarettes).

Like many who are used to living in stable, resilient urban cores, it is unavoidable to look upon the hyperreal fringe with paternalistic fascination. This fringe will likely soon adopt many uses for Giant LED Screens, and a multimillionaire personal injury lawyer will likely advertise his services on them. Next to the cell phone tower obelisk, a billboard multiple stories tall proclaims the return of the savior. Or a car dealership. Someday, the region will embrace AI data centers, and the eerie presence of this ghostly pseudo intelligence will be felt within our pockets, as the avatar pings for our attention, suggesting products it overheard us discussing.

Everyone in the car seemed to have sat perfectly still for close to an hour. Neither the steering wheel, accelerator, the open page of the book on my knee, nor crossword puzzle stirred except for the minute jostle of the uneven road surface. My Dad said “whoa,” in an unusual tone of voice—an unusual utterance in itself for him, who is rarely surprised by the world, having exercised total and complete control over it since a time before my arrival. He said “whoa” and then a man passed us in the center lane on a motorcycle, wearing khaki shorts and a black shirt, at such a speed that even from inside the vehicle it was like experiencing life as a photograph: the sudden flash that is visual as much as it is sonic, total and instant, and then a lingering afterimage, as just as we were aware of him, the bike had climbed the hill in front of us. We speculated that he may have been going 160 miles per hour. If he had wings, he would have taken flight.

Slugs and snails experience the world at their own serene pace, which to us seems glacial. Likely for this guy it was the same way: while we were incredulous as to his chances of surviving the afternoon, it’s possible he has simply tapped into a higher plane of existence. Speeds compresses time. The rider becomes acquainted with a smaller, more manageable world, shrunken by the gravitational force of his velocity. All the other cars on the highway might as well have been sitting still; idle as cows for him to weave around. We admonish the speed demon for exceeding the threshold at which skin grafts and a great deal of luck might extend his life span in the event of a crash. But he knows it’s better, more glorious, to rain down on the highway in a pink mist.

Later, traffic going the opposite way was stopped dead for miles as the state troopers stood and watched a freight truck burn. The smell of smoke finally hit our nose as we came to the end of the column of dead cars. That’s Mississippi.

Farther north, along the Tennessee border, the community of Southaven comes to terms with the recent construction of an xAI supercomputer, the largest in the world. A product of our highly accelerated, post-regulatory industrial environment, the facility was up and running faster than a local bureaucrat could walk to the designated smoking area in their nearby parking garage.

The computer has a tremendous appetite for electricity. In order to satisfy this hunger without the need for regulatory approval, xAI installed fleets of natural gas generators onsite. Nearby residents report a nonstop, infernal droning sound, and the radius of heightened cancer risk gradually increases. The state of Mississippi eventually approved the turbines. A nonprofit news desk reported on a community hearing, where a familiar dynamic plays out: individuals wake up one morning subjected to a new form of industrial torture. They find they have no recourse. Everyone is powerless.

Our current economic logic seems to adhere closer to the principles of a helmetless daredevil careening down the highway. The logic of the daredevil is seductively simple: what happens if you crash and die?

Well, you just don’t crash.

A talented young man is tap dancing to a song that is probably called “Ordinary.” Next to him, another young man DJs. The banner behind them identifies some sort of youth program for which they are raising money and “awareness.” The music is playing out of a small boom box at the volume of a landing aircraft, a deeply annoying song that feels sentimental and phony, something you might hear in a bubble tea shop. I think it’s by John Bellian. I type the search term “ordinary disney ass song” and the results show multiple other candidates, one by Adam Fiedy, one by Alex Warren. So it could be any of those. After they ask for donations, the duo does a saxophone tap dancing riff on “Slide” by Calvin Harris, followed by “Ready Or Not” by The Fugees.

What makes a song “better” or “worse”? Both songs employ the pop songwriting technique of using a single word as a metaphorical locus, the rising and falling action of the song’s verses serving to introduce a new interpretation of this word, and therefore a glimpse into the life of the singer, often in the context of a relatable experience seen from a new perspective. The holophrase exemplifies the genius of pop music. A single word can carry you through the night, give your crew a shared sense of purpose, and most importantly, is easy to remember. This technique is most successfully used in songs like “Toxic” by Britney Spears (toxic is bad, but….what if it was good?) “Umbrella” by Rihanna (let’s find security and comfort in good sex), especially in “Think” by Aretha Franklin (you better think!).

The “ordinary” song is cloying PATRIOTCORE…one-dimensional, trumped up. The audio is heavily compressed. It sounds like there is an orchestra, a gospel choir, and an entire machine shop of buzzing tools shoved inside of a taxi cab, along with a ukulele serving as the angelic lute to shepherd us through this valley of the damned. It is undeniably a song born of Youth Groups, of megachurches, and a traditional notion of love as service. Cliche’d elements of “epic” anthems deliver bombastic weight, channeling the influence of Wagnerian opera through the Stomp-Clap Hey-O format of millennial folk pop and the cynical, risk-averse logic of entertainment megaliths like the NFL. The song is in half time, a characteristic of the march, the military traditional form common at varsity sports games and an essential part of many American music educations. We plod along, battered by explosions, both figuratively and sonically, the music of bombs landing on targets. It’s music for the empire, the sort of thing you can imagine hearing in an advertisement for a video game where you and a cooperative team of special agents kill terrorists and save the world from nuclear destruction; a montage of nurses “racing against the clock” to save a patient’s life; a divorced parent shedding a single tear watching their child’s soccer practice in their 8% interest rate SUV Crossover. The “ordinary” song is bad because it has been manufactured to provoke passion, patriotism, the duty to commit oneself to something greater. It is also (okay i did look it up), about the singer’s devotion to his wife, which is very sweet.

How can we compare this apparent sincerity with “Slide”, a far more modern and less chaste approach? The bass is pushed to the front, the beat is unhurried but jubilant, and the melodic theme, a siren, here twisted into a seven note cycle reminiscent of a bird call, repeating only once at the beginning before ceding ground to Frank Ocean. It’s a clever trick because the theme sticks to you, and you could swear you hear it over and over, permeating the song despite its absence.

Frank Ocean has made a career of describing melancholy and ecstasy as dueling emotions of the restless spirit, as a prism separates a single beam of light into its component waves. His delivery is grounded and world weary. In the cherubic opening, Ocean suggests he might “buy that boy with a pipe”. In the official record, he’s referring to a Picasso painting from the Rose Period of 1904-1906, depicting a street boy named Little Louis, whose name and identity are only part of the historical record because of his fateful decision to sit for Picssso. With a dolorous expression, Louis holds a pipe pointed into him, as if he were offered the instrument without knowing what he should do with it. Upon the canvas Little Louis is elevated by Christian symbolism, a laurel of roses on his head, wings of flowers emerging from his back. In the context of the song, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine this lyric as a euphemism for buying another sort of pipe. The desire for physical affection, beauty, and for exalted million dollar paintings that symbolize a time of freedom and hedonism at the onset of terrible wars…both of these desires may lead one to emptying their bank account. The “Slide” song is good because it’s musically effortless, delicate, and has depth. We see the inner conflicts presented by money, vice, and the impulsive comfort of aimless sadness weighed against the desire for something more.

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There is still the world.

It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still here, buried underneath a rubble of memory. If you pay attention to other people eventually they might say some canned phrase: that there is a non-zero chance that tomorrow everything will “blow up”, it’ll “pop off”, it’ll “go up in flames”. Personally I get more spiritual and pragmatic utility from the view that this has already happened. This is going to the be the baseline assumption. Everything has already happened, all we have left is the world. Today will be redeemed, and tomorrow will be better.

Here are some things we’re going to try to “get to the bottom of:”

Thing Zero:

Why am I doing this?

Thing one:

I don’t think you need to take the tea bag out. It’s fine. It can steep indefinitely. I think the tea reaches some level of infusion beyond which no further infusion is possible. The tea bag is happy in the hot water so I leave it there. I might be like a bird, in that I’m lacking certain taste buds. I didn’t understand the purpose of the gigantic bag of “spicy” seed mix in the garage, the size of the bag and it’s location implying a yard usage, which normally is not the same as human use, or at the very least suggests careful inspection, the garage being the place most people store all of the things that might poison or injure you if used incorrectly, but the use of the word “spicy” does imply a human use, spicy is a quality that only matters to people, unless….of course: birds do not have “taste” spicy, or they don’t care, or they don’t have taste buds, or there is some scientific miscommunication between birds and the broader conservational industry regarding what they do and don’t taste, while squirrels on the other hand, they taste, and they hate spicy, this is also a fact to some degree, so you buy the seed mix that squirrels hate and birds are ambivalent about. In this case “spicy” is probably a term of convenience. If you have eaten spicy bird seed, please let me know. I do steep Earl Grey for 3 minutes, otherwise it makes me feel like I’m about to pass out.

Thing Two:

We do have a lot of extra stuff that we might be better without. Every living thing on Earth died millions of years ago and we figured out we could turn their viscous sludge into stuff and when we’re done using the stuff—a lot of it is designed, on purpose, to be used once, and then thrown away(!), which is sort of a misleading phrase, because it’s not going “away”, it’s going into a small pile that will later be moved to the curb, where it’s compressed and then added to a much larger pile (I don’t know the location of the larger pile), all of this is to say that much of what is being used and then thrown into a pile of permanent disuse is not even in a state of use for any substantial period of time—when we’re done with the stuff we have to put it all somewhere. We put all the stuff into small cubes with retracting metal doors that are inside gigantic cubes with 24-hour security. This was determined to be a viable industry and so now the highways are dotted with gigantic cubes people put their stuff inside.

Thing Three:

There is a lot of terrible writing and art but some of it is actually pretty good. Being human pursuits, both the terrible and the good are worthy of discussion. The validity of human pursuits has come under scrutiny due to the invention of a multidimensional spreadsheet that has indexed the entire internet.

Thing Four:

Pattern Seeking Brain is a vertically integrated media ecosystem. Just kidding, it’s a brand. No! It’s diary about our relationship to information.

R