I could not sleep last night in Los Angeles. The hotel room had turned humid, and when I stepped outside, the weather was worse. Heavy clouds and fog covered the sky as dawn broke. Bouts of insomnia used to torture me, but I’m getting better at sleepless nights. I read. I write. I walk. I’ve learned to relax because I’ve discovered I can still function without sleep, even though the day burns brighter at the edges.
Los Angeles looked like a prestige dystopia as we inched towards Interstate 15 early on a Sunday morning. In the wake of record-breaking rain, electric green vines and weeds spilled down walls of damp concrete, and a heavy fog draped itself across eight lanes of traffic and swallowed the vehicles a few yards ahead. After we crossed the San Gabriel Mountains, patches of sunlight broke through the dark grey swirl, and soon we were speeding northeast to Vegas under a brilliant blue sky.
Twelve miles east of Barstow, where the desert appears especially endless, I glimpsed the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square. Dammit, I thought, maybe I can’t function without sleep after all.
Tank Man by Chen Weiming | Yermo, California
We hit the brakes and followed a dusty road past the gigantic fiberglass ice cream sundae that marks Eddie World, the largest gas station in California. A mile later, there was a handmade sign for Liberty Sculpture Park, a 36-acre patch of desert purchased by the artist Chen Weiming as “a memorial ground for victims of communism.”
Gigantic sculptures dotted the horizon: Xi Jinping’s bloodied head, thirty feet high with COVID-19 spike protein for hair—and theories that the Chinese government had torched its first iteration. A recreation of the Goddess of Democracy stared down Interstate 15, a hundred yards away from the number 64 sculpted in steel, 6.4 meters tall, to commemorate the date of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, which is 6400 miles away. And there was the Tank Man, staring down a Soviet-style T-54 tank in the blankness of the Mojave desert.
Perhaps the American desert is a canvas large enough to contain scenes from all corners. But I’m beginning to think something else is at work in this landscape that functions like memory, how it distills history and fantasy into visions that refer back to the ancients who believed this hallucinatory space spoke the language of faith and horror.
C. and I spent the day wandering through museums. There’s a game we play whenever we enter a gallery: after spending a few minutes looking at every painting in the room, we guess each other’s favorite. This wager forces us to slow down and consider each image more closely. But sometimes, the game feels risky. After all these years, how well do I know C.’s taste? How well does she know mine?
How do we define favorite? Over the years, we’ve landed on three criteria, which sometimes overlap:
Which painting do you like the most?
Which would you like to live with at home?
Which draws your eye?
The last question has become the most interesting. I’m more aware of the images that magnetize my eye even if—sometimes especially if—they do not match my sensibilities. An uneasy blotch of color or the shine in some dead countess’s eye will leave me rethinking my default preferences and spiraling into existential terrain: what is taste, anyway, and where does it come from? Do I even know what I like? And so on.
In gallery E203 at the Getty, we both selected Jusepe de Ribera’s stern portrait of Euclid. Two rooms later, C. thought my favorite painting was a tranquil Madonna, but it was a dark picture of a pope. I’m glad I can still surprise her.
Drawing from Il Ritorno d'Ulisse (The Return of Ulysses), William Kentridge,1998
California was a shocking green as C. and I drove into Los Angeles, the hills almost alpine while we navigated ten lanes of bumper-to-bumper.
Last night we visited a friend in the Coachella Valley who studies water for a living. Water leads to fire, he said. The heavy rains that battered California last month are generating more grass which will die over the summer and provide more fuel for fires. We nodded quietly over our drinks, grateful for our yard of sand in Nevada.
At the Broad Museum, we dug the William Kentridge exhibit, whose smoldering landscapes looked like scenes from a fast-approaching future.
Kentridge’s sketches and films meld the surreal with the political but, above all, they offer a reminder of the value of art as performance, a mode of play rather than a clinical intellectual exercise. The charcoal smudges, the streaks of erasure, the jittery handheld camera—at what point does imperfection accumulate into a distinct aesthetic? In Kentridge’s hands, the stray marks that my perfectionist brain would consider an error become a vital style, ripe with mystery and teeth.
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003
Messiness will be a crucial tool in the footrace against artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, a Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted over Montana. In our hotel room, C. and I caught a few minutes of the Pentagon’s press briefing, where a taciturn general studded with brass said the word balloon in every sentence. It was delightful. Can we shoot it down? asked the reporters. Where is the balloon now? “The public can look up in the sky and see where the balloon is,” the general said.
The Chinese spy balloon has become part of the weather report as it drifts across Kansas and Missouri. Perhaps this is a weird echo of the mood that swept America in 1957 when Russia launched Sputnik.
I spent my birthday speeding through the Mojave with C., and it was the best celebration I could ask for. Time and space get wobbly in the desert. I think I’m puttering along, but the speedometer says 98. Hundred-mile distances collapse, yet the interesting scenery on the horizon never seems to draw closer.
Thirty minutes southwest of Vegas, my heart leapt when I saw I had no signal. It’s so rare to find myself out of range, unreachable, and I savored the sensation. (It rarely occurs to me that I can turn my telephone off.) We zipped along the two-lane ribbons that carved up Bristol Lake, a dried-up landscape of mud, gypsum, and pyramidal mounds that looked ritualistic and alien. (Bristol Lake has 2.3 stars on Google.)
An hour later, a familiar thrum moved through my belly, and my hand twitched, wanting to check my phone. But I was still out of range. What was I missing? I imagined all the messages and demands piling up, all the possible emergencies. I felt negligent, as if I’d abandoned my post.
When we reached Twentynine Palms, I checked my messages in a Denny’s parking lot: a birthday wish from a friend, a spam message for better financing, and an email alerting me to the release of a new album. I joined C. in a red pleather booth, ordered a Grand Slamwich, and marveled at the rot in my brain.
My little tics and anxieties seem to be moving from the vexing to the comic. Perhaps this is a happy side effect of getting older.
Ten years sober today. These four words fill me with a strange concoction of gratitude and shock. Gratitude for obvious reasons: I am not dead; my life feels worthwhile, and I have my sanity and people who care about me—which is more than many people get. But a decade is an incomprehensible amount of time for someone who lived in a broken Lincoln Towncar and couldn’t stay sober for an hour, let alone a day or a month.
Shock is good. I cannot accept sobriety as a given fact. Years ago, an old man in a church basement said, “Stick around long enough, and this becomes a life spent stepping over dead bodies.” It sounded brutally morbid at the time, but it makes more sense with each passing year. I know too many people who’ve died, some with double-digit sobriety who believed they were cured. So I must continue to do what I’ve been taught and keep practicing the little routines that have been drilled into me over the years. Most of all, I must turn outward and focus on others, even though my tendency is to turn inward—as if I might ever solve the riddle of the self. But that’s a dead end.
This morning I went for a run in the desert behind our home. The elevation creeps up subtly, then suddenly. Patches of snow coated the sand, and I carefully picked my way through rivers of broken stones. After fifteen minutes of huffing and cursing, I looked back, stunned by how far I’d climbed. I switched off my running mix and savored the blessed silence. Metaphors abound.
If you’re struggling, please reach out to someone. I’m here.
Snapshot of us crossing the street | Photo by Earl Carlson
Some friends visited this weekend, and we played mahjong at our kitchen table until three o’clock in the morning. A few hours later, we wandered into the desert and touched some cacti. Then we hit Spring Mountain Road for dim sum. That’s when I began to appreciate how many moods exist in Vegas and how dramatically the scenery can change in just a few miles.
In the afternoon, we went to Red Rock Casino and saw Infinity Pool, an excellent film about a man who has a life-changing experience while on vacation and doesn’t want to go home. After sunset, we huddled around a firepit in our backyard of stones. Fifteen minutes and eight miles later, we ate xiao long bao on the Strip before getting lost in corridors of soaring metal and glass. On Monday morning, I found myself wandering through the endless black-lit acreage of Meowolf, an exercise in sensory overload that left me feeling old.
But I don’t mind feeling older. It brings a liberating sense of honesty. For instance, C. and I bought a used PlayStation because we wanted to play The Last of Us alongside the new prestige television series. Maybe we’ll become gamers, we thought. And for a few hours, we diligently killed zombies and collected the ingredients for Molotov cocktails. Then we discovered we could subscribe to Britbox and access an endless supply of quiet murder mysteries. The Playstation waited patiently while we dozed on the sofa to Line of Duty, and a few days later, we returned it.
Recommendations for Britbox programming would be much appreciated.
Last week I drove two hours to Barstow to meet a friend for french toast. We agreed to meet in Barstow because it’s halfway between Vegas and Los Angeles, where he lives. After speeding west across the beautiful blankness of the Mojave, I found M. nursing a coffee in a booth at Roy’s Diner. We both felt the cinematic weight of the scenario, like we should be plotting a murder.
The desert is littered with bizarre facts, and I often think I invented them, like a fragment from a dream or a misremembered film. Example: twenty miles east of Barstow, there’s an abandoned waterpark, and M. and I toured its ruins. I later learned this is where Boards of Canada debuted their Tomorrow’s Harvest album in 2013, and the Korean supergroup BTS live-streamed a concert there last year. These facts are clearly stated on the Wikipedia entry for the waterpark, yet I’ve returned to this page several times this week, wondering if I made them up.
The sensation of slippage continues. This morning I checked out ChatGPT so I could understand the fuss. I gave it this prompt:
Write a blog post about visiting my friend M. in the Mojave desert, eating french toast, and exploring an abandoned waterpark.
Here’s what it generated two seconds later:
Last weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting my friend M. in the Mojave desert. After catching up over a delicious breakfast of french toast at a local diner, we decided to take a trip and explore an abandoned waterpark in the area.
When we arrived at the waterpark, we were in awe at the state of disrepair the once-thriving park was in. We started our exploration by wandering through the abandoned buildings, peeking into the empty rooms, and trying to imagine what it must have been like when the park was operational. The graffiti on the walls and the debris on the ground gave us a glimpse into the lives of the people who had visited the park.
The slides were rusted and overgrown with weeds, and the pool was empty and cracked. The park was eerie but also beautiful in its own way. The natural elements had taken over, and the park had become a part of the desert once again. It was a fascinating experience to see the contrast between the man-made structures and the natural landscape.
As the sun set, we made our way back to the car, feeling both a sense of wonder and a touch of sadness at the sight of the forgotten waterpark. It was a reminder of how nature reclaims what man has created. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to share this experience with my friend M.
The ability of a machine to generate a coherent narrative in two seconds is stunning, even if it reads like a grade-school essay written under duress. But its observation about the beauty of “nature reclaiming what man has created” is what really frightens me. There’s the sense that the algorithm isn’t just composing but thinking. And this particular observation has the tone of a threat.
Spent last week thrashing in the grip of a nasty bug, my fever dreams enhanced by the American government, which, after fifteen votes for speaker of the House, has been reduced to an endless screech. Here in Las Vegas, we’re catching the faintest edge of the atmospheric river, a weather event that sounds like something from a fantasy novel.
In The Peripheral, William Gibson describes “the jackpot,” a cascade of crises that wipe out most of humanity ten or twenty years from now. His vision of the apocalypse is “multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns . . .” And ten pages later: “Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.”
Shopping at Walmart in Vegas sounds bleak, but it was remarkably pleasant. Phil Collins sang about how he could feel it coming in the air tonight while I collected the materials for a shepherd’s pie. But the secret ingredient must be found elsewhere: Sichuan peppercorns.
There’s a bird in the desert that sounds like a buzzy little synthesizer, maybe a 303, and I’d like to know its name.
Maybe it was a bum pork dumpling or a vicious stomach bug, but I’ll leave the mystery alone and simply savor my return to consciousness after thirty-six hours of being reduced to a sweaty, heaving mess. Not a very auspicious start to the new year, although it made me grateful for the things I take for granted, such as speech, digestion, and regulated body temperature.
In the grip of my delirium, I half-watched a lousy Netflix series that can be viewed in any order, which seems like a trial balloon for AI-generated entertainment. But algorithms cannot compete with the messy spectacle of humans. This afternoon I tuned in to watch some jackass repeatedly lose the vote for House Speaker, three times as of this writing. It was a testament to the glorious stupidity of American politics and, relatedly, an extraordinarily entertaining reminder that repetition amplifies humor and pleasure. Sort of like Donald Barthelme’s very short story, The School, which I recently revisited via George Saunders’s Story Club.
C. and I rang in the new year at the top of Route 93, where the Black Mountains unfold and reveal the sudden lights of Vegas in the valley below. Fireworks bloomed over The Strip, and we killed the lights and joined the other cars on the shoulder to watch the show. Parked along a dark highway, watching colorful explosions over the city: it looked like a hallucination. But after twenty years of fantasizing, we finally made it to the desert, and I felt a stillness I hadn’t known in a while. Two minutes past midnight, a steady rain began to fall, and we drove home on an empty parkway, feeling futuristic while fireworks burst alongside our car.
Seven hours later, I woke up with aggressive sunlight in my face. The sky was an overwhelming blue, a blank new year stretched before me, and the night before felt like a scene from a half-remembered film. My resolutions are the same as usual, although slightly more attuned: write more (always start with paper + pen) and read more (in a chair rather than bed) and also worry less, run farther, be more pleasant, and make some music again.
I’ve given up my hunt for the bleeding edge. Perhaps we’re living in an exhausted age that offers only iterative variations on deep-grooved patterns. More likely, I’m too old to catch the mind-blown thrills I felt twenty or thirty years when I first heard Boogie Down Productions, Drexciya, Autechre, and Thomas Brinkmann.
Several of my favorite albums this year came from artists who delivered my favorite albums from other years: Romance, Ralph Kinsella, Pye Corner Audio, and Kali Malone. Bohren & Der Club of Gore did not release a new album this year, but Kevin Richard Martin delivered a pair of records that filled my annual need for a soundtrack for rainy streets. I want to think my aesthetic has become more refined over the years—that by now, I know what I like. But another word for this might be stagnation.
Thankfully, the artists listed here had other plans. They’ve pulled off the neat trick of delivering the sounds I love while pushing them into unexpected nooks and alleys and, occasionally, wheeling around and smashing my assumptions to bits. My favorite records this year sounded messier than in years past: scuffed and bruised yet defiant—which sounds like the future.
Nils Frahm nixes the piano and now I like Nils Frahm. This was my most-played album of 2022: three hours of shadowy pulse and thrum that sounds like it’s keeping something darker at bay. A perfect soundtrack for reading and writing.
Romance & Dean Hurley – In Every Dream Home A Heartache
A symphony for today’s malaise that looks backward, cribbing its title from my favorite Roxy Music song, the one where Brian Ferry reaches peak modernism and enjoys open-plan living while he romances an inflatable doll. Wrong-headed infatuations and Ballardian ennui also fill this record as soap operas swirl in a half-remembered fog of ringing telephones.
A slightly less despondent cousin visits the house of Bohren & Der Club of Gore, where time no longer works and the only illumination is rain-streaked neon. Trapped in the hour of the wolf, Martin soaks his jazz in static and grain until it potent barrel-aged doom.
The guitar gets destroyed but its ghost remains. Kinsella recorded one of my favorite albums a couple of years ago, and now he’s returned to conjure visions that blister and flare like the afterimage of something that cannot be named. When I close my eyes and listen to tracks like ‘Holding On To Memory Devices’ and ‘An Ocean In The Pines,’ I see the beauty and drama of a burning cathedral.
Drowsy Casio calypso beats and dead-eyed vocals edge toward a liturgical reenactment of Murakami’s superflat theory: pure stasis, the carcass of a cold-wave song circa 1982 buried beneath a thousand layers of acrylic.
A pair of endless liturgical drones with bursts of science fiction at the edges. Thanks to composers like Malone, Tim Hecker, and Yosuke Fujita, the pipe organ feels essential in the 21st century. (If you worship in the church of Chain Reaction, Maxime Denuc’s Nachthorn smudges the line between novelty exercise and classic timepiece, esp. “Dusseldorf”.) With Living Torch, Malone trades the organ for trombone, bass clarinet, and sine wave generators, but her harmonics remain pure stained glass.
Electronic music as topography: plenty of breathing room with miles of alpine air over pristine clicks and deep valleys of bass. This project remained clandestine for a while, harkening back to the golden age of faceless machine music distinguished by clinical names like Model 500 and Basic Channel. Now we know Civilistjävel! is the alias of a quiet Swede, but there’s still plenty of mystery in the music.
100% uncut Blade Runner aesthetic: plaintive chords and endless twilight, the image of some new lifeform crossbreeding Stars of the Lid with Vangelis at the edge of the sprawl.
If you prefer a more incense-soaked Vangelian future, M. Geddes Gengras pairs psychedelic twang with his cyborg bells. This was the first album I played when I set up my office in Vegas, where I finally have a desk large enough to enjoy a stereo field, and it’s a deep artificial dream forever looping the moment psychedelic music reached for the sitar, affirming that tomorrow’s music can also steep itself in magic.
Midnight gets dragged into the sunlight, where it’s peeled and stretched into steam-gathering drones and dreamgaze guitars. A welcome update on the blissed-out and spiritualized sound, this album plays like a movie I would very much like to see.
The Black Dog has held the fort since ’89, and with this one-hour mix, they melt down their recent fixation on architecture into glorious ambient exhaust.
Originating from points unknown, this gunky tape lurches from battered breakbeats to hypersaturated spaghetti westerns to bottomless hum. Each time I play this, I remember the teenage nights when I would drive around Detroit to watch the steam rising from the winter streets.
It rained in Las Vegas last night. For a few minutes, I sped down a rain-slicked desert parkway with beads of water across the windshield. When I rolled down the window, a beautiful scent filled the car. Like fresh vinyl. But I’m not a nature writer.
The unique scent of desert rain has something to do with dry soil and the creosote bush, and it has a scientific name, petrichor, derived from the Greek words for stone and the blood of the gods.
The rain stopped as I pulled into the parking lot of a church in the far northwest corner of the city. I sat in the basement for an hour and listened to men speak. A small map hung from the wall with a blob of land around a body of water, and after squinting at it for a while, I thought I could make out the shape of Clark County and Lake Mead. Later I realized it was a map of Guatemala.
Disorientation has become my hobby. Each day I learn something new. For instance, Las Vegas has more Del Tacos than any other city in the United States, and it’s exponentially better than Taco Bell.
My current night-driving soundtrack is this Dutch track from ’82 that sounds downright sinister forty years later: They call it computers, useless anyway, they say it’s the future, they say it’s useful for us. Do you remember when we used to be human? They call it robots, meant to be your friend. They say it’s the future, they say it’s useful for us, and we should be grateful…
