Refit, desert, ploy, snap. In an ambitious ploy, an enterprising oil magnate snaps his competition by cutting a deal with the Kuwati government to refit desert pumps destroyed in the Gulf War.
June 11th, 2025
A frigid twenty-four hours. So much on the mind and many more ideas lost in fog.
In the late afternoon, I sat outside at a cafe with J playing chess and eavesdropping on a nearby conversation. A man was recounting the time when he was nearly killed while riding his motorcycle on Sunset. Apparently, he took a corner too fast, a corner that proved to never end, and was being dragged toward the center lane dividers; the yellow caution sticks drawing ever closer; magnetic. In an instant and recognizing the impending impact, the man veered between the sticks and into the oncoming traffic. He was faced with a truck (because of course it had to be a truck) barreling toward him, its yellow headlights blinding. He pulled the handlebars of his bike, the truck so close that he could feel the air compressing against the vehicle’s side skirts, pushing him away. Maintaining his momentum, the man careened back into the correct lane and further, to the shoulder. A shaky breath, the weight of narrowly escaping death, he felt someone pounding on his helmet. It was his new girlfriend, his first time taking her out for a ride. She had peed herself.
June 12th, 2025
Laying around with R, my ear pressed to her chest. Almost instantly, I could hear the rhythmic, dull thumping of her heart. Unexpectedly, I began to hear more, the squelching and gurgling of ventricles and valves. It was riveting; mildly repulsive but totally captivating. I thought of a few scene ideas. My ear, suctioned to her chest, popped when I looked up at her, and I noticed the outline of my earlobe indented on her chest like a hickey. I could even make out the inner folds, the antiragus and antihelix, which formed a soft pink M in the wider traces I left behind.
An Air India 787 crashed today, killing all on board except one forty-year-old man who walked away relatively unscathed. The incident has an uncanny resemblance to the plot of M. Knight Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Is Vishwashkumar Ramesh our secret superhero?
Went to ZE’s play tonight; an avant-garde clown affair. The production was split into five acts with each act featuring a different performer. The first performer favored conversing with an Alexa-inspired android named Lola about her anamatronic desires to control humans. The dialogue was clever and the actor’s admirable control over his body elevated the physical comedy. To top it off, he employed a small puppet to retell the myths of Sisyphus, Icarus, and Narcissus. The second act was my favorite, a Waiting for Godot-like absurdist piece about a woman who wants a cake at her birthday but does not want to eat any of it. The actor did an awesome job of using voice modulation, physical comedy, and props to articulate a sense of things falling out of rhythm; disorienting in real time. The third act was largely forgettable, altogether reflective of current events. Its proximity to reality muddled my ability to suspend my disbelief and engage with the piece in any meaningful way. There was a somewhat comical dance number set to B.Y.O.B by System Of A Down, which was at least enjoyable to hear coming through the large auditorium speakers. The guy sitting in front of me and I had a fun time rocking out in the dark. I was most anticipating the fourth act, as the performer had wildly entertained the crowd during the pre-show with a series of vulgar jokes and uncomfortable audience interactions. As a complete act, the performance was lackluster; a thin plot bouyed by ostentatious gestures. Jokes were primarily about sex (and he really left no stone unturned here) or race (he, a black performer and we, a mostly white audience). But these topics grew shallow quickly and came to feel like low-hanging fruit after a time. As R pointed out, she found herself laughing not because of the quality of the humor but because of how uncomfortable she felt by the performer’s commitment to vulgarity. Credit where credit is due though, he did have a very funny sketch advertising the many benefits of a time travelling vehicle which was my favorite single moment of the show. By the time the first four acts were complete, the show had run on for ninety-minutes and I was beginning to fatigue. The fifth perfomer, much like the third, was much too on the nose with her delivery, spelling out the ideas present in the show that, quite honestly, needed no further shading. Her costume design, however, was the most inventive: she wore a nude suit, proudly displaying eight plump breasts to which she held her children (hairless rabbits, of course). The show ended entirely when her husband, the first performer bedecked in large boils and a penis on his head, limped onto the stage with a bag of In-n-Out burgers. The cast devoured them as the lights faded out.
June 16th, 2025
Reworking a story I have been tinkering with for too long. I find myself getting lost from time to time in the nitty-gritty of scene writing, rather than prioritizing the broader outline. I have a rough outline too boot, it is just, well, rough. The few opening scenes I’ve written are dynamic but anyone can write an intriguing first five pages... I fear my stagnation on the page, retreading the same tired ideas, pining for tidbits of new story, reflects a broader lethargy in my life. I am really feeling like Gregor Samsa these days; a roach on my back; flailing.
I wrote the above note this morning and promptly went outside to find a parking ticket waiting for me. Rent is overdue as well. I went to a cafe down the street and read the Metamorphosis straight through over lunch. It has been over three years since I read it in a park in Philadelphia; with S, we laid about on a hammock that was not attached to any tree. Today’s reading was much richer. I felt an unexpected and pervasive pity for Gregor while simultaneously being disgusted by his predicament. I cringed and yet I sat on the edge of tears. I wanted to hug R and called her after finishing the story; the best I was going to get was her voice. Kafka is just the type of writer I am looking for right now, for numerous reasons, and I am suprised that I have not read more of his work. The Trial is on my bedside table.
Dinner with A and J then Wes Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, with A. J spoke highly of the film and I went in with favorable expectations. The film was beautifully costumed and choreographed; everything was buttoned up and battened down. I left the screening feeling emotionally apathetic, unaffected by the story. After some rehashing with A, I pinpointed my primary grievance: the acting. In early Wes Anderson movies, the characters (and by extension, the actors who play them) are so vibrant with personality. There is a genuinely human quality to the performances, a sense of real people with real issues on screen. But in Anderson’s latest three films, the acting performances have felt much like the rest of production: overly stilted and technically perfect. In creating characters who move with the choreographed precision of his camera, I fear Anderson has sucked the very marrow from his actors’ bones. I am left feeling little for them. Although this evolution is subtle throughout his filmography, I return to Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums with a newfound appreciation for their charming acting quirks and sense of actorly spontaniety. Anderson, for me, is in an era where the development of his personal visual style has begun to diminish the quality of his storytelling, like Malick after The Tree of Life.
June 23rd, 2025
For me, of the Photo-Secessionists, the photographs produced by Edward Steichen, Anne Brigman, and Paul Strand stick out above the rest. Viewing their work, I get the sense that each had honed an eye unique in its quality, compositionally rich and harmonious in its use of shapes and shadows; distinctly photographic. Brigman’s pictorial photographs prioritize relationships between the human form and nature, often crafting their union through compositions that might recall scenes in the Bible. Although she was not the only photographer working in the Pictorialist style and nodding to a biblical past, her work vastly exceeds others’ for all the photographic reasons mentioned above. Strand, on the other hand, particularly in his work in the mid-1910s, clearly represents a more “modern” approach to photography, especially in regards to street and city subjects. His images incorporate none of the intentional softening of the photograph, a hallmark of Pictorialism. Instead, Strand prioritizes sharp focus and a forward-thinking sensibility, using people and buildings not as subjects but shapes in broader compositions. Steichen’s images are the best of both. As a Photo-Secessionist, it is hard to find a photographer who was more prolific than he and yet his style continued to evolve, pushing Pictorialism to its limits and then himself beyond it. I would say that he also took Pictorial portraiture to its nth degree.
August 5th, 2025
Watched Portrait of A Lady On Fire tonight with R and at the closing credits felt the sensation that no living moment could match the angelic tone of such a composed array of interactions.