This site is currently under construction. Though the blog is active semi-daily, the portfolio has been mostly archived and will only showcase newer work—anything done before 2020 will remain offline. As I’m currently working on a variety of new projects, there will be significant updates throughout the fall and winter. (There will also be a regular front page directing to the portfolio instead of the blog, but due to the fact writing is the only really active part of the site right now, I keep it on the front page.)

Anyway, thanks for visiting and hopefully the actual content of the site will be up sooner rather than later.

I tried to add an archives page to the blog a couple days ago and the entire site collapsed with the message This Website Has Encountered A Fatal Error strewn across the bottom. I’m still trying to figure out what I did wrong. One of the hurdles I have is a lot has changed since I learned to code and build out WordPress themes back when it was still a new thing. Most now isn’t even code-based, and the parts that are require an industry-level knowledge base to understand.

Beyond just being an inconvenience to dig up pages that actually have the code and examples I’m looking for to build out pages with, it just kind of makes me feel bad about the internet. There used to be something incredibly fun and rewarding about spending an afternoon—because, really, that’s all it took in the days of simple HTML sites—making a personal web page.

Reflecting

These days, we live in the age where everything fails after a couple years. Smart phones, appliances, cars. Nothing is built to last. We can look at old furniture, hand-built by craftsmen, and admire its longevity and attention to detail. When I was growing up, I remember companies still offered lifetime guarantees on what they sold. Somewhere along the line, that all stopped. That’s kind of a parallel to what I imagine the not-too-distant future will be like for people online, surrounded by social media AI slop, where nothing is real and no voice is authentic, wondering what the early days of the internet were like.

There’s a purity and connection created between a person and an object when something is done by hand. It’s a kind of transference of humanity to an object. The combination of technology, capitalism, and trade expansion has always disrupted the processes of personalized building. From log cabins to the suburban sprawl, from loom-spun sweaters to fast fashion sweatshops, from painted portraits to the photograph to AI slop—we’re always in a state of ‘progress,’ yet simultaneously lamenting the fact the objects that inhabit our lives were always better back in the day.

Nothing is ever better because it becomes automated. It just becomes more convenient. It’s justified to the masses by way of ‘consumer savings,’ yet the harm comes in the form of disrupting community businesses with box stores, with individual creative designs replaced by templates, with personal interactions turning into people consulting AI bots about their lives. Industrialization has been a slow burn and the jump to what comes next has been a long time coming, but it’s almost here and I don’t think people are prepared for how this is going to alter the very nature of what it means to be human. It’s just so sad.

Off Wilshire

As a follow-up on some of my hospital thoughts, another part of my experience was actually leaving the place. I arrived around 10:00 pm on a Tuesday and left about 40 hours later. All things considered, that’s not an overly-long stay. However, as I left the parking lot and drove toward the 110—as merging on to a freeway is the most LA way to be reminded you’re back in the real world—I felt incredibly disoriented.

It’s not just that time seems to stand still, but because of the sterile and ubiquitous nature of hospital rooms, I could have been anywhere. Returning to Los Angeles felt like I’d warped into another world after spending nearly two days staring at the same off-white walls, watching repeats of Law and Order: SVU and listening to my roommate repeat the same Christian affirmations on his phone for hours on end.

There have certainly been two-day stretches where I haven’t left my apartment before, but I’m always reminded of where I am by the helicopters overhead, the cars honking from the intersection, the customers of the plumbing store loading materials into trucks in the parking lot outside my window. I can haul my laundry upstairs and have a pretty decent vantage point of Koreatown from the top. I could lie in bed for days on end and still know I’m in LA.

In the hospital, it’s different. All I hear are asynchronous beeps, all I can see out the window—if there is one—is a concrete parking garage. The news on TV reminds me that LA is out there, somewhere, having car chases and traffic jams, but from my vantage point it might as well be Mars. I didn’t realize it until I left, but I was slowly going crazy while I was stuck there.

It makes me think of everyone who has extended stays in these places, or the elderly living out their terms in the death-care equivalent. People who have no connection to the world outside of four, unchanging walls, stuck in the places the rest of us don’t have to be reminded they exist in. We have such a deformed view of what care entails in this country, and I doubt it’s going to get any better anytime soon.

Cats in the studio

Coming soon

As I return to work, beginning with a 2026 edition of Standing Still In A Storm, the cats have begun to acclimate to the new studio.

I’ve been taking it slow over the past month, getting this space and the apartment to what feels comfortable, but I’ve been developing larger concepts to begin actually painting soon. I’m hoping the next few months will see some new music and a slew of new visual art so I can enter the new year with a bunch of stuff ready to show. I do have longer-term plans for the gallery space, but for now it’s just nice to use for work and be able to roll out of bed and make some tea and not have to drive anywhere.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin imagined a future where only wealthy people would be able to travel and ‘those of lesser means’ would only be able to experience the world through a VR headset. He goes on to talk about how that might create a divide between rich and poor. Jesus Christ.

It’s quite obvious how the chess pieces of technology, corporations, capital, violence, and governance are being aligned right now to create a future where the majority are ruled with a generally automated iron fist by the few. It’s the plot of endless sci-fi stories, but what comes to mind is Elysium, where the rich build themselves a giant space station as the rest suffer on a burning Earth patrolled by robots. What’s also evident is that those who aren’t quite wealthy, but live comfortably above most, are generally in favor of this divide, even though it would likely see them stuck holding the short end of the stick with the rest (see: Ross Sorkin and the entire NYT op-ed section).

There’s a good chance it is too late to do anything about it. While groups of people who lean left politically exist in the United States, they’re predominantly in urban areas and proportionally tiny compared to the population at large—a population that believes capitalist neoliberalism is ‘left-wing.’ The type of change required to do anything about wealth disparity—via reform or revolution—is simply impossible. In turn, the country will be forced to look on as the people are robbed, their food supply poisoned (or, eventually, lost), and any reaction brutally policed by stalkers and thugs using AI surveillance. (Even at the local level, despite outrage from the people who elected them, city councils are voting in favor of building data centers everywhere.)

Meanwhile, the wealthy and their fans will go on to have discussions about how they’ll be perceived as all of this violence against humankind continues unpunished. The United States has probably passed any point of anyone in power having to deal with any kind of consequence for any action whatsoever. We can’t even properly handle cops standing around for hours during a mass school shooting, much less force the release of the Epstein Files. This country has volunteered itself into submission.

China might be able to reframe the balance of power in the world and possibly diminish the role of capitalism in the future, but the United States will surely burn itself to the ground—and as much of the world as possible—before that happens.