MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • The Director’s Cut

    I went to the movies expecting escape. That was my first mistake. The ticket app said the film was playing at 7:40. It had been playing all week. People were dressed for it—like a minor holiday, a secret handshake. Leather jackets, ironic denim, that look of mutual recognition you get when strangers agree they’re here…

  • The Phantom’s Revenge

    ACT I: ARRIVAL & THE PERFORMANCE. They invited me to Santa Monica, to the clean, well-lighted prison of culture called The Broad Stage. The mission: to bear witness to a “subsidized art opera,” a thing of fair quality and certain protection. A fortress against the market. A mausoleum with a liquor license. I went armed…

  • The Compromise

    Marcus adjusted his Hermès tie in the reflection of his office window, forty-seven floors above Manhattan. Below, protesters marched through sleet, their signs dissolving into papier-mâché resolve. He’d meant to join them. “I really was going to go,” he told his reflection. The reflection nodded. It always did. Instead, he turned to his computer and…

  • Value Maintenance

    The Farcaster news is being framed as a rare moment of honor in tech: Merkle stands down, infrastructure is handed to Neynar, Dan Romero and Varun “V” return roughly $180 million to investors, and the VCs applaud the discipline. On the surface, it does look clean. No slow rug. No zombified runway bleed. Capital comes…

  • The Rerouting Reflex

    There’s this persistent consensual hallucination floating around American boardrooms and think-tank server farms— that empire, the whole blood-soaked apparatus of extraction, coercion, and hegemonic mindfuck, somehow booted up on American soil sometime around 1945, as if the Republic had invented the very wetware of domination. As if Bretton Woods was the Genesis block and everything…

  • The Certain Uncertainty

    Lord Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, had discovered that there were only three truly dangerous things in the world: Dragons, People who believed strongly in destiny, and People who believed strongly in spreadsheets, especially those who used the ‘Auto-Sum’ function as a substitute for a moral compass. The third category was currently seated in the…

  • Honestly Fake

    I live in Venice, and Abbot Kinney is a little deal with the devil we’ve made. Every shop there is paying for the privilege of make-believe — pretending not to have to be really organic while performing it anyway. Santa Monica doesn’t pretend to be organic. That’s the difference. Abbot Kinney says: You may skip…

  • The Black Hole

    I first noticed it on a Tuesday, which seemed appropriate for a sinkhole. It had appeared overnight in the center of Municipal Plaza, approximately where the statue of Founder Henderson used to stand,  who had apparently founded something at some point but the plaque had worn smooth decades ago. The sinkhole was modest. Perhaps three…

  • The Registry of Orphans

    I. The Architecture In the autumn of 1952, the directors of the National Historical Institute summoned Dr. Eliseo Ferrer to inform him that his services as a chronicler had been terminated. He was not being dismissed, they hastened to clarify, but rather reassigned. After thirty years of distinguished service documenting the agrarian reforms of the…

  • The Curator

    I was hired to soften things. Not to lie, Mr. Vilner explained during my interview—he was very clear about this—but to prepare people. To ensure that when the bad news arrived, it arrived gently, cushioned by context, wrapped in perspective, delivered with appropriate emotional scaffolling so that no one would be traumatized by suddenness. “We…

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