MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • Anatomy of the Swashbuckle

    You know the scene: the pirate swings across the chasm on a frayed rope, the fedora’d archaeologist narrowly outruns the crushing stone, the scoundrel slips from the trash compactor’s jaws with a wink and a spark. These moments weren’t just popcorn fodder—they were a battle of wits played out on the screen. It was a…

  • Larping Platonism

    This points straight at the deep tension between artistic realism and mathematical idealism. Artists already live in a world where form doesn’t ensure function, where structure can betray you, where the beautifully designed fails. Why is this news to mathematicians? Math pretends it lives in a frictionless world. In art, surprise and disappointment are built…

  • Active Terrain

    When I first watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I didn’t have a lightbulb moment. I had something stranger—a sense of orientation. Herzog’s voice drifted through the darkness, talking about Paleolithic painters using the cave’s natural forms as part of their art. How they didn’t flatten the wall into canvas—they collaborated with it. Followed its curves.…

  • The Outside Man

    So. France issues this thing: the Jacques Deray Prize. Annual. For crime thrillers. Ritualistic. Like maintaining a firewall against cultural amnesia. Deray himself? Lyon-born. Not your Melville-grade auteur. Not Becker-level firmware. But industrial-grade. Reliable. A workhorse chewing through continental action flicks with Delon or Belmondo plugged into the lead roles. La piscine? Sure, a sexy…

  • The Cagliostro Protocol

    Three data points from dead media. Cagliostro (1949), Orson Welles cranking out noir-gothic product for Italian producers from Alexandre Dumas. Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker manufacturing Victorian anxiety porn. The Magician (1908), Somerset Maugham debugging English imperial neurosis. Different decades, same protocol stack. The pattern: charismatic outsider penetrates failing system, exposes its vulnerabilities, triggers cascade failure,…

  • The Great American Newsletter

    Substack has become an anthropological study in creative calcification. Writers publicly transforming into content strategists, thinkers becoming take-generators, artists evolving into audience builders. It’s fascinating to watch in real time—the slow fossilization of creative ambition. Here’s how it happens: Someone starts a newsletter to share their work. Within months, they’re writing about writing newsletters. Within…

  • Crumbs

    You see, it’s the small things that damn a man. Not the great sins—they’re too obvious. It’s the quiet compromises, the clever validations, the glimmering, idiotic comforts we make with the world. It begins so modestly—so innocently. The shopkeeper who nods approvingly at your coat, the way his eyes soften when he sees you’ve chosen…

  • A Better Future

    One of the risks in demanding a “better” media — smarter, fairer, more truthful — is that you might get exactly that. Or rather, you might get something that looks exactly like that: a more intelligent system, but also a more evasive, more adaptive one. Harder to dismiss, because it now knows how to perform…

  • The Infrastructure of Irresponsibility

    Nice infrastructure of irresponsibility we’ve managed to create. First you have first-order grifters: weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and logistics suppliers — the ones who actually make the machinery of violence. Then come the second-order grifters — the think tankers, foreign policy fellows, and adjacent “experts” who don’t make weapons but polish the narratives that keep…

  • Stoner Bricolage

    One key difference between A New Hope in 1977 and The Empire Strikes Back, and everything that’s followed since, is that we shifted from stoner bricolage to nerd control panels. In the ‘70s, the best sci-fi came from people who thought like collage artists and smelled like soldering irons. You had stoners with engineering degrees,…

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