I used to think about becoming a religioso, but I don’t have churchly predilections, or the other kind. The life of the ascetic appealed to me. Failing that, I wanted to be a hermit, but my tastes run to blissfuly functionless shoes and Zegna dress shirts. The problem is that I have never wanted the opposite, to be a member of society or its adjuncts. I notice that my dogs are exactly the same. They have no desire to participate in most activities, but God forbid those activities take place outside of their witness. There is a place for people like me, the table for one. I don’t get invited to parties. Nothing about my affect suggests that I am a party person, which is not to say I am a wall flower. I enjoy parties, but it is clear to most people that I am enjoying them on a completely different level than small talk come-ons and the freedoms of music and libation. I need people to animate my world, but “people” in most contexts could not be more tedious, I imagine that being deeply connected to them is like being at the end of a very long rope on which you will eventually hang. I have often wondered what I have in common with sociopaths. Latin suggests to me that both their problem and the solution lies in people. I imagine that my neighbors would describe me in the same terms, “He was so quiet, very polite. We knew him well enough to wave, but I can’t remember ever speaking more than a few words with him.” I need these people, which is to say, I would not live where I do without them. Indeed, I would not be as happy if...

1. Whatever is happening is actually happening and I am interpreting it correctly. 2. Whatever is happening is actually happening and I am not interpreting it correctly. 3. Whatever is happening is not actually happening and I am interpreting it correctly. 4. Whatever is happening is not actually happening and I am not interpreting it correctly. These are the four states of the schizophrenic mind. They are not exotic. Almost everyone should find them recognizable in themselves, but it is rare to have a collective experience of fractured perception: this is why we go to the movies. The Lumiere Brothers inaugurated the era of perceptual tourism in 1895. No (healthy) person suspects that their perceptive powers are compromised, so we, as a rule, default to condition one. The early history of film is the process of the first audiences learning that the special space of the darkened film theater was a space where, unlike the space of the street or even the live performance, the conventions of perception need not apply. In the intervening period, a train of filmmakers has dared to present increasing challenges to the perceptive powers of their audiences, but it has not been until now that an auteur has developed a truly schizophrenic direction. Darren Aronofsky is the only interesting American filmmaker of his generation, our generation; in an industry that seems only able to turn out Little Fockers, bristly, challenging, deep films are wholly alien. Aronofsky is either the last or the first of his kind, a scary genius. I sat down to watch Pi expecting to see another overwrought indie that had made a stir at Sundance (in the era when Sundance still meant something) and would likely have the feel of a thesis project. I expected it to...

I grew up in the era of grunge. I still remember the first time I saw 1,000 kids going nuts to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It was an under twenty-one club in Quebec during the winter carnival. I was seventeen and half drunk on the mixture of red wine and grain alcohol they called caribou. It was the first time I realized that there was a spirit to an age. I had always read authors who insisted on what I thought was a gross oversimplification; now I am one of them. There are key moments when the music, sometimes a specific song, acts as the most perfect and concise description of the collective consciousness. We are not in such a moment. We are living through the era of Hip Hop disco, the awkward adolescence of this art form. Browse the charts, or better, tune in Top 40 radio, and you will find that Taio Cruz “came to dance, dance, dance, dance,” that Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull like “the way you move on the floor,” that Usher admits the “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love.” As a phenomenon, this music is neither very interesting nor particularly relevant. I never thought Hip Hop, a form that is laudable in many respects would look to or indulge in disco, a style that is looked back on with almost universal derision. The problem, just as it was in the 70s, is the site of the music. The 70s saw the site of music swing towards its extremes. On the one hand, it located itself in the garage. The children of the first generation born into Rock & Roll took their second hand instruments and their worn down ideas of music and turned them into something in which the...

Dispense with the posing and what are you left with? I would like to be able to answer this question for you, but the pose is the defining feature of our time. Were you to dispense with it, no one could predict the catastrophe. Like everything else that we are paranoid about failing to recognize about the twenty-first century, street art is not new. It is not a new route to cultural significance. It is not an unlikely voice for counter messages. It is not an entity without a history, or precedence, or a canon. The soundtrack is The Velvet Underground fed into a loop. There is a knock-knock joke about a writer of fortune cookies; I can’t remember the punchline. I once tried to explain visual literacy to my mother. It didn’t go well. I kept coming back to the issue of profanity. “Skull fucking” nets 2,980,000 hits on bing. The revolution will be sponsored. Is feedback really that interesting? I like going to the movies alone. I go to the $2 theatre. They don’t really mind if you drink. The venue could have easily housed a porno theatre, but video killed that off. The theatre is properly debased. The seats are broken. The screen is stained with sticky splotches; soda is semen. It is the best venue to watch a blockbuster I have ever found. The star is the green stripe down the screen. Every generation believes that the world will end on its watch; is it ego? What does it mean to be famous and a recluse? The thought police have declared war on the oxymoron. I can’t remember the last time I saw art in an art gallery. I was promised ‘reciprocal ferocity;’ instead, I get Laura Owens (3,240,000 results)....

We no longer live in the world of 24 hour news. We no longer live in a world of polished spin, of coif and smile, and the confidence scheme wherein the delivery of “news” is a sleight of hand. Theoretically, LiveNewsCameras.com (LNC) does not contain anything revolutionary, or even new. The world of news aggregators is crowded by bullies; all the major names are represented disproportionately, with varying levels presumed and apparent mediation. Equally, the concept of the unedited news feed has been around since the first commercial satellite dishes could pull in network feeds in the 1970s. Equally, there is a noble history of journalists, researchers, and media-junkies who have dedicated themselves to unmasking the propagandists, so why then LNC? Once upon a time, not necessarily when I was a young artist, perhaps before, and perhaps before I knew what name to give it, I decided that it would be a useful skill to know how to produce the “magic effect.” It was at a time when I was obsessively watching all the con man movies I could find. I was a student of that moment, the split, the turn, the thing that artists and theorists and philosophers spend so much time thinking of new vocabulary for. LNC is magic set to 180 beats per minute. Sugarcane distilled. Poppies refined. 169 self-refreshing and streaming screens of news from around the world in which the commercials have been replaced with a peek behind the curtain. News/reality/actuality presented simultaneously and without hierarchy. Ever wonder what Al Jezeera’s election coverage has in common with that of Bristol TN’s Channel 11? (Hint: they both insist on including and over-pronouncing “Rodham.”) There are, though, more profound insights to be had: It would be funny if weren’t so frightening...