The first three minutes might be my favorite opening scene in cinema.
The Joshua tree was named by Mormons in the 1850s, who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land.
“Virga” is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground. It hangs across the desert like a torn curtain.
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A 77-minute sequence of grainy loops and phantom Americana built for a late-night drive.
I did not enjoy the mountaintop.
I want to press this book into the hands of every artist, writer, and seeker I know.
Last night I covered my office with maps.
Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country.
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A collection of dusty loops and late-night mixtapes.
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Seven years ago, C. and I debated how the world would end.
The most compelling piece was an incidental moment rather than any piece of art, which is often the case.
“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial or not at all.”
MSU Broad Art Museum East Lansing, Michigan 2023
A rant in this Terrible Year of 2023 when algorithms are chewing through the scenery.
It might be more necessary than ever to develop an eye for the timeless.
Killing time at the Vegas airport.
The desert silence baffles my Midwestern mind.
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Limbering up to flee an algorithmic hallucination while finding solace in a French future from ’82.
If starvation was on the table, would you rather eat your own finger or a stranger’s?
I had no idea there was so much weather in the desert. By now, I thought I’d be begging for a cloud.
Death Valley is a place where ten thousand acres of scenery can easily go missing.
The artist’s obsession becomes the listener’s obsession.
My office has three little whiteboards that tell me what to do, and I rely upon them entirely because I’m a nitwit in the morning.
I told myself it was a trick of the light rather than the result of the grey in my beard.
Shuffling through nature’s silence with strangers felt oddly intimate.
I pondered the idea of a Vegas-themed casino until I gave myself a headache.
These are days of shooting down unidentifiable objects in the sky.
Twenty miles west of Barstow, where the desert appears especially endless, I glimpsed the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square.
C. and I play a game whenever we enter a gallery: after spending a few minutes looking at every painting in the room, we guess each other’s favorite.
William Kentridge’s smoldering landscapes look like scenes from a fast-approaching future. Meanwhile, a Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted over Montana.
My little tics and anxieties seem to be moving from the vexing to the comic. Perhaps this is one happy side effect of getting older.
Ten years sober today. Proof there’s such a thing as grace.
I don’t mind feeling older. It brings a liberating sense of honesty.
I stitched together my favorite running songs because I need some solid entertainment to keep me moving through the desert.
The desert is littered with bizarre facts, and I often think I invented them, like a fragment from a dream or a misremembered film.
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 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.
C. and I rang in the new year at the top of Route 93.
