Why the renewed fervor for outer space all of a sudden? What’s really goading oligarchs into lower orbit or the military creation of these little space forces? What promise does space hold for terrestrial powers? I’m clueless personally, unversed in the science and science fiction behind it — let me…

I wanted to review Villeneuve’s Dune, but I probably won’t get around to seeing it. Instead, I watched David Lynch’s Dune for the first time yesterday, always having known that I’d like it just from the way it looked. These first impressions are always surprisingly informative. In thriftstores, you can…

I don’t think neoliberalism is the root of all our problems. In fact, I don’t think that there is such a thing as “the root of all our problems.” When it comes to questions of social power and complexity, I just don’t think they can be answered by extirpation, by…

This essay was written to accompany “See Beyond the Horizon,” an exhibition at And/Or gallery showcasing the YouTube works of Kyoobur9000 Company and the wider logo editing community, curated and diligently — and I mean diligently — researched by Sebastian Demian of Dem Passwords. The show, which runs until Aug…

Music has always negotiated a fundamental tension between its language-like elements or structures and its math-like elements or structures. For a long time in the West, the mathier side was subjugated to the language side as a matter of worldview. Within earlier liturgical music, things like melody were ultimately…

The relationship between music and animal noises like meow, quack, oink, roar, woof, buzz, neigh, and moo is, I think, profounder than first appears. Jotting down a number of composers inspired by birdsong alone, the list just goes on: Beethoven, Berlioz, Rossini, Prokoviev, Saint-Saens, Mahler, Messiaen… They couldn’t get enough…

This last decade has been pretty unkind to the American Underground. It may not be death, but man alive, it is inarguably decline. Two causes immediately spring to mind: the painful rise in rents and the price of “space,” on the one hand, and on the other, the shift from…