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.

Downtown LA is the strangest metropolitan center I’ve ever seen. During the day there are cars everywhere. The freeways surrounding the area are packed, someone is always honking at a stoplight, the busses maneuver around cyclists. But the people? Almost the opposite. A few areas, like the 7th street Metro station or Little Tokyo, have a fair amount of foot traffic but a substantial amount of the city is proportionally sparse compared to New York (or even a smaller city like Boston or San Francisco).

At night, it’s even emptier. I was early for a concert Monday night so I walked around for half an hour or so and saw maybe a total of ten people, most of whom were walking their dog. Granted, I was up by the museums where there aren’t really any restaurants open but it’s a pretty common sight all over—unless you’re on a block where there’s a venue with a performance scheduled, you’d probably be able to count the amount of people you see on one hand.

I’ve heard downtown wasn’t like this before the pandemic but I don’t have a reference for that. Maybe it’s because this is such a car-centric city, you don’t have people generally walking from subway stations to a destination in any given neighborhood, and the closest most people come to public interaction is seeing someone through the window of a car. But it’s still very strange and emphasizes a certain loneliness one can feel in LA. You understand there are four million people in within a 15-mile radius, but you wouldn’t know it to look around.

Zionists will be lamenting the attack against Israel today in 2023, and it’s a load of bullshit. Not that the attack didn’t happen or anything—but that Israel is somehow the victim. When decades of oppression and violence result in retribution, you can’t collectively claim innocence.

There’s also the fact the IDF was ordered to enact the Hannibal Directive, which basically says to kill anyone and everyone—Israeli soldiers and citizens included—to avoid hostages being taken. These casualties were blamed on Hamas, even if they were not the ones who pulled the trigger. (This is from a report by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.)

The years since have seen non-stop violence perpetuated by Israel, predominantly against citizens, with complete support of Israelis and western governments alike. American colleges punish protesters and quelled free speech while allowing for violent counter-protests and police intervention. England mass arrests the public who support Palestine. Primary media sources—The New York Times stateside and the BBC across the pond—both have repeatedly published support of Israel and frame headlines constantly to portray them as the victim and downplay what is happening in Gaza.

Simply put, if you support Israel now you would have supported Germany then. Perpetuating a genocide can be swept under a flag of any color. Seeing other people as subhuman to the point they deserve extermination—especially when your justification is some millennia-old myth from a book—is ideologically grotesque to the point there probably isn’t a word vulgar enough to describe it.

I don’t care much about Trump’s speech where he riffed on Iran ‘taking out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. Like, whatever. Guy says more egregious things in a week than most politicians do in their entire career. Anyone surprised or offended must live under a rock. What is kind of funny to me is just the people who cheered in the crowd.

The speech took place in Nebraska, where earlier this year over 2,000 people climbed some stairs to honor the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. It’s just one of those things that goes to show how absolutely warped the red-state perspective is. Like, nothing on 9/11 affected fucking Nebraska.

So many of the people in these places will say bullshit like Never Forget while, in their next breath, hoping that some ‘liberal’ city gets wiped off the map. It’s a weird, fake patriotism where political morality adjusts to whatever point they’re trying to make (or support) in the moment. It’s the epitome of spineless American stupidity, so no wonder these people support a guy like Donald Trump.

These days I’ve been thinking about the boiling frog.

The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.

Obviously this can be used as a metaphor for power and greed, which I think the United States is a prime example of in its 45-year decline since Reagan took office and conservatism has chipped away at just about everything that was beneficial to the people at large. Today, though, I’m thinking about it in a more literal sense.

Los Angeles is currently being hit with its third heat wave this summer. Usually in LA, the season is certainly on the warmer side, generally ranging between 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit with a few days that reach the hundreds. This year we’ve had three separate occasions where week-long heat waves where the low temperature would be 95 and even the middle of the night will be 80. While this is also a side effect of the Super El Niño going on, it certainly raises some eyebrows when it comes to climate change.

At this point it’s deadly obvious the United States has no interest in preparing for the possibly apocalyptic levels of displacement and death that could occur over the next 20-50 years. It’s not like the wealthy would care—they will most likely profit in air-conditioned offices and afford to avoid any catastrophes, and if a substantial amount of the population dies off, that means the remaining resources on Earth are proportionally larger. And they certainly don’t care about animals.)

While we’ve been the frog in the pot metaphorically for some time, now it seems like we’re in the literal phase. The climate is going to get more extreme, but not all at once. It’s just going to get slowly worse, with a few more deaths every year, until it’s far too late. Those in power will throw up their hands and say, “There’s nothing we can do about it now, you’re all on your own.” The domino effect of social deterioration will accelerate and there’s a decent chance Mad Max: Fury Road is retroactively seen as some kind of prophecy.

And the only way out of the pot is through wealth—and who knows how long that will really extend your life with the possible consequences of this looming crisis.

Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel program

I was lucky enough to attend the sold-out performance of Rothko Chapel (among a few other, shorter works) that the Monday Evening Concert series put on tonight in honor of what would have been Morton Feldman’s 100th birthday (at least, earlier this year). It’s the second show celebrating Feldman I saw this week—last Friday, Oracle Egg had BlackBox Ensemble perform a similar event with different works.

Now, full disclosure, I knew nothing of Feldman before these concerts. While I listen to plenty of avant-garde music, it’s often in the shape of post-rock-adjacent bands or weird things I see at sparsely-attended local shows where someone has an array of objects they turn into something between a harmony and an unstructured wall of noise. The sort of high-brow, famous and studied crowd isn’t something I’m really familiar with.

That’s why I was particularly fond of hearing this performance tonight. I had no clue what to expect—it was honestly my love of Rothko more than anything that made me buy a ticket to begin with. But I left completely stirred by the music.

Performance set-up at Oracle Egg

This is the wonderful thing about experiencing art in general—there’s no telling how seeing Rothko Chapel will affect me or the work I make down the line, but it undoubtedly will, somehow, even if I am not fully aware of it. It feels almost stupid to write out—how taking in something creative can provoke inspiration—but we live in really stupid times when people are actively working against the idea that art made by humans has a place or purpose in life.

Beyond my ongoing laments about AI, though, seeing this made me both glad to be in Los Angeles but saddened by how capitalism all but ruins these types of performances for so many people by not allowing an avenue for them to be experienced at all. A ‘market’-based economy will always be cruel to the arts because it’s generally unpredictable what, if anything, will even break even with a financial investment (much less be any kind of success). Major cities generally have enough demand for a variety of cultural options that many forms of art can cultivate audiences; mid-sized cities are lucky to have one independent theater and a liberal arts college that offers annual concert series. Rural areas are basically fucked beyond anything that doesn’t play in a national, corporate movie theater chain.

Experiencing art helps develop abstract thought. When ten people see the same movie, even one that might be ‘philosophical’ in nature, they are all presented with the same basic concept in their heads because the plot of the film poses questions it seeks to answer. Perhaps it’ll make the people think about variations of that question, but all ten people will have fairly concentrated thought processes. Taking in an experimental concert, or looking at abstract paintings, makes the ten people come up with their own questions before trying to reach a conclusion. The experience itself provokes so much more than what entertainment provides for—it has the potential to spur on more conversations, develop greater ideas, and make people more open in general.

As ideas are being chiseled away at and culture that doesn’t embrace corporatism is stifled, it feels like we’re all losing out. Violence seems inevitable at this point, and I can’t help but think that’s partially due to the fact so much of what we see and hear and experience on screens of any sort keeps pointing in that direction. We all end up thinking in similar patterns of decay because that’s all we’re shown in the dominant forms of media. It’s all just so sad, and I guess the music was bringing all that up tonight.