Nominated for a National Magazine Award, our second print issue features Hilton Als on Prince's Eyes, How Adderall Changed America, Sex with Neanderthals, New Fiction by Isle McElroy, Ordering Elements, and more.

value packs everywhere
declutter this immovable lease

I love to degrade my warring self
outclassed & dragged nasty into view
renegade humiliation
the portrait of a betrayal

I waltz borrowed after borrowed form
slam recyclables in the trash
crash efficiency off the balcony
a true Leveller, luddite core

today I slow down
time and plant gold to dig, cancel future,
check my views, look for you

it’s chore day & I boil your packer
melting your biggest lack
unstuffed and sorry, the scams
you inspire in me, tidy and daddy

I wake you asking do you think we really
exist today? humming undust me

I kiss your yawn
agape or asleep, I got free
fall

we get along so great
but you throw away what I’d keep forever

deep dive to a sudden
crevice, how you scrump the edges
low hanging possession
so intricately ours
unlike all this private fucking
property, where maggots make soil,

rats scamper on the newly built fence
hoarding bursting fruit

that I don’t pick, I simply suck
what’s growing on the branch

like a line that doesn’t Regulate
I edge commonly
our verge retrieved the most daily feeling
your Orbit dragged me

defining joints, I explore abrupt logic
to faster’s limit a supporting support

consider a layer’s flux Expression —

that’s my wavelength
flaunting my freedom threshold

tide line thinner based enough to lift math
to eliminate this halo fade

the rock is permeable. most rock
except when it’s pushed to the limit.
erosion trips the sun dial to an amount
only the Law can measure, as if the future
could be accounted for with numbers that stay
on their side of the bed.

even though I was older, I always thought
you were. I looked to you for answers like
what if there is beauty, and you aren’t there
to receive it? define heaping. just before it begins
to hurt. if I evaluate you within a degree of perfection,
will that prove my love?

so I began to claw
at paving stones. stardust slams
our present. Velocity. take the city apart.
Velocity. you are good at controlling
the pace at which the horizon arrives.

you are willing to walk away,
which makes you closer to me
than I am. when you clock my compulsion
it’s in the palm of your hand. like a busted
lock, the phone is ringing. Velocity.

despair makes a hero out of me, so I get
busy, fly around an untangled sun, up
End my-self, donate my organs to the poets.

earth creaks blatantly, asking
for help. hands crumbling, sprinting
surfaces. Velocity. once you lap me,
I can finally let you. it used to be
much simpler. ♦

(Nightboat Books 2021), which was a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry.

ser-martin

The Most Daily Feeling

Jack’s stranded on the roof of a warehouse. He’s in a pickle. His date has disappeared. Downstairs, a bomb-wielding madman in a sharp suit is looking for him, and someone’s just cocked a gun to his temple. But Jack is unflappable. He smiles, and turns to the camera, eyes twinkling. “My first instinct is to run like a scared rabbit, because that’s my nature,” he admits. But Jack has other options. He could leapfrog off the roof to an adjoining building, for example. Or reveal his true identity as Special Agent Jack Beaner, of the FBI. He looks at us expectantly: his fate is in our hands.

Or it would be—if it were 1992, and I was at the Loews Cineplex on 19th Street in New York City, watching

, the first mainstream interactive movie. In that case, I could just grab the controller attached to my armrest, and press a button. Yellow for

. A control system would tally my vote, along with everyone else’s, and play the most popular selection. For my $7 ticket price, I could watch three of the 68 possible variations of the movie in a row. But, of course, it isn’t 1992 anymore.

 on a folding chair in the packed screening room of Whammy Analog Media, a VHS tape store and microcinema in Echo Park.

There are no controllers in the armrests here, so the audience is just hollering at the screen: RUN! JUMP! SPECIAL AGENT JACK BEANER! It’s part of a program of forgotten interactive films, all artifacts of a brief period in the 1990s when it seemed like Silicon Valley and Hollywood might actually become one.

In Hollywired—or would it be Silliwood?—audiences would play the director, molding the on-screen action to suit their fancy. If the atmosphere at this screening is any indication, it was a raucous, fun time, so long as you didn't really care about movies.

was the brainchild of Bob Bejan, a former ad guy who cut his teeth writing “industrial” musicals—huge productions, often stacked with Broadway talent, staged at trade shows and annual corporate meetings. Bejan wrote 

in two weeks and shot it in six days for $307,000 in the Soho offices of his production company, Interfilm. His collaborators, mostly New York theater people with improv backgrounds, laid each plot beat on the ground and walked the forking storyline paths, acting out what each character might do at key points in the narrative. The final shooting scripts were structured like a 

It was, to say the least, a new way of making movies. On set, the First Assistant Director had a meltdown, convinced nothing was going to cut together, and the film’s lead, a former MTV Video Jockey named Kevin Seal, joked that he could barely keep track of the story. But 

 came together, and in theaters updated with LaserDisc control systems, the film “exploded,” Bejar tells me. “It was just one of those things, a freak thing—it just worked.” At screenings, college kids in lab coats riled up audiences, encouraging them to yell and press each other's buttons. Teens loved the pandemonium so much that they didn’t even notice the degraded quality of the early digital projection compared to film.

Critics were less generous. Having “endured” six repeat screenings of 

 at a megaplex in Lakewood, California, the 

’ Peter Rainer concluded that the format resembled a high-school pep rally more than it did a movie, the unfortunate result of test-marketing eating art. “The spooky thing about

,” he wrote, “isn’t how different it is from Hollywood movies but how much the same it is.” As if to prove Rainer’s point, Sony Pictures gave Interfilm a five-picture deal and a bungalow on the studio lot. They committed 100 screens at Loews Theaters across the country to be retrofitted with pistol grips and digital projectors, to the tune of some $87,000 per room. The following year, Interfilm went public and raised $25 million.

It was the dawn of the tech bubble, but Bejan was certain they were onto something. “We thought of ourselves—well, we probably thought too much of ourselves,” he concedes. “But we thought of ourselves as squarely rooted with one foot in cinema and one foot in gaming.” Two generations of movie-watchers had grown up with controllers by then, and video games were about to eclipse the movie business in sales for the first time. Why couldn’t audiences have it both ways? Why not play the movie? Five-time GRAMMY nominee Joe Jackson, who composed 

’s original score, put it best. “Whenever you get an opportunity to be involved in something new, you might as well be in on it,” he said. “Even if it goes the way of 3D glasses and Odorama.”

It was a raucous, fun time, so long as you didn't really care about movies.

Interfilm would go on to shoot four more interactive movie-games. The second, 

’s Bob Gale, starred soap star Billy Warlock as a bionic man who disciplines jerks: audiences could make Mr. Payback force an executive to eat from a dog dish full of monkey brains, for example. As with 

 included repeat viewings of the movie, so audiences could try alternative punishments—although film critic Gene Siskel, of 

, swore on their show he’d have paid twice as much to see it only once. “This is not a movie,” Ebert, who would later name 

 the worst film of 1995, agreed. “A movie acts 

Following Ebert’s logic, if a movie is meant to act 

audience, then a game is the inverse: an invitation for the 

 to act. Of course, within the confines of a “game” like 

that invitation is limited to predetermined decision points. But even in the more open sandbox of a modern video game, there are boundaries on action—in fact, those boundaries are what define the form. As the games scholar C. Thi Nguyen observes, all games have rules and obstacles, imposed to constrain player agency. And games are, he argues, the 

 of agency. “As stories let us record narratives,” Nguyen writes, “games let us record agencies,” encoding them into “artifactual vessels” that can be passed around and temporarily embodied by others.

I’m not sure what that means for an interactive movie like 

. Despite offering plenty of freewheeling fun, it hardly feels like an expression of the art of agency—unless the agency being explored is that of an indecisive film editor. I have the sense that Ebert’s curmudgeonly take was the right one: an interactive movie is not a movie. But it isn’t a game, either. It’s somewhere in between the two, and its precise location on the spectrum shifts with the decades. Although it never seems to succeed commercially, a few weirdos in every generation give it a try.

 was billed as the world’s first interactive movie. But that wasn’t exactly true. “Let me tell you, it goes back—all the way, nearly, to the beginning of film,” explains Stephen Padmore, a developer who has been tracking the interactivity of games and cinema on his website, 

A century to the year before the release of 

, European merrymakers could shoot live rounds in “cinematic shooting galleries," killing safari animals projected on a paper screen. This concept survived into the 1970s; Nintendo’s first arcade game, 

, played back live-action gunslinging sequences on dual 16mm projectors. Film gave way to LaserDisc in the 1980s, which is when a 12-year-old Padmore discovered the interactive cartoon Western 

 in his local arcade. “It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen,” he says. “I was just thinking to myself, 

 I was convinced the combination of video games and movies was the future of entertainment.”

For the next decade or so, that future looked bright. Interactivity bounced from arcades to home media in the ’90s, with “Full Motion Video” games that took advantage of the storage capacity of CD-ROM to layer live-action video clips over computer-generated worlds. These FMV games often featured top Hollywood talent, like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell, who played twenty-seventh-century fighter pilots in 

 or Tim Curry, who played Dr. Frankenstein in a Sega Saturn game. Even the great Burgess Meredith’s final performance was on CD-ROM—in 

, a detective slasher also starring Christopher Walken. In 1995, 

creator Bob Bejan was poached by Warner Brothers, which was joining other major movie studios in spinning out interactive divisions to “repurpose” their “assets” for these novel formats. 

But Hollywood’s attempts to shoehorn cutting-room-floor scraps into interactive games led to a number of high-profile flops, like a much-maligned 

 FMV. By the late 2000s, the general consensus, according to game designer James Lessard, was that “mixing video games and cinema 

can only lead to a product that is both a bad movie and a bad game

.” FMVs became a punchline in both industries, and game designers began to opt for pre-rendered CGI cutscenes instead, frustrated by the cost and production expertise required to shoot live-action sequences. The dream, it seemed, was dead.

Padmore is still waiting on the future he glimpsed at the arcade in the ’80s. “But we're closer now than we've ever been,” he promises. He should know; his archival website isn’t so archival anymore. Since about 2014, he’s seen a steady clip of new interactive releases, largely made by filmmakers who have never played an FMV, or seen oddities like 

“There's something in human nature, where people watch a movie, they don’t like the outcome, and they say, 

you know what? I'm gonna make a movie where you get to decide

,” he says. “And that happens with every single generation.”

These generation cycles tend to follow technology. Interactive media, having exhausted the possibilities of film, LaserDisc, CD-ROM, and DVD, made a leap to streaming platforms in the 2010s with projects like Netflix’s 

 and Stephen Soderbergh’s 2017 iOS app, 

Although these weren’t particularly successful—Netflix has since pulled all of its interactive titles—the dance between games and cinema isn’t over yet. Actors have returned to games, only now they perform in motion-capture suits, and game engines like Unreal Engine have become integral to Hollywood’s visual effects toolkit. Those old crunchy FMVs aren’t cringe anymore; they’re a vibe. And a new generation of game designers, inspired by auteur filmmaking and empowered by distribution platforms like Steam, has begun to reinvent the FMV.

“What's happening now is the tools are not in the way,” says Bob Bejan, who hasn’t quite given up on the dream, either. “Back in the ’90s, we spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to overcome the technical challenges instead of really thinking about storyline and characters, and compelling narrative. Now, for the first time, it feels like we're at the precipice of this thing really breaking through.”

I hope so. I started researching this piece in 2023 for my own reasons. Talking with Padmore and Bejan, I was quietly banking my findings for later reference—my friends and I were working on an FMV project of our own. Like

, it would live in the forbidden zone between movies and games; like the FMVs of the ’90s, it would try to wrangle live-action performances onto console and PC screens. I was hoping a deep dive into the history of interactive movies would give me some ideas—about what to avoid, what to attempt, and what we were getting ourselves into.

Although interactive cinema never seems to succeed commercially, a few weirdos in every generation give it a try. 

But there’s a difference between writing 

 games and actually writing one yourself. As I started working, I quickly realized that there was something about the format that I couldn’t square with my own narrative goals. In traditional FMVs, the player is the protagonist—they’re the one with their finger on the button that decides “yes/no, left/right, fight or flight,” as Padmore put it to me. For the player, that’s a laugh. But for the writer, crafting a compelling, one-size-fits-all main character is a real challenge. It’s an empty crater at the center of the story: when Special Agent Jack Beaner looks at the camera, who does he see? Is it a confessional? Is it Brechtian theater? 

From the vantage point of 2025, these questions feel eerily, almost unpleasantly familiar. After all, social media feeds are dominated by performers speaking to camera: pundits, personalities, and conspiracy-peddlers who weave narratives from the news, nudging their audiences to “solve” the puzzle of reality. They address us directly, asking for engagement, for us to like and subscribe to keep the story going. Everything feels like a game; everyone thinks they’re the main character; maybe the whole world is an FMV now. This fundamentally changes the stakes—to say nothing of the possibilities—of an interactive cinema. Which is why I turned, at last, to Sam Barlow.

Barlow is a BAFTA-winning game designer; his three titles have done more to develop a grammar of interactive media than anything else in the last 30 years. “A big frustration of mine is the reduction of video games to being a more childish form of roleplay,” he told me, when we spoke over Zoom. “The stories I like are the ones that are more layered, that have unreliable narrators, or interesting framings, or push you to try and identify with characters in interesting ways. Even when I was making more traditional-looking video games, I had a little Post-it on my desk that said ‘

Instead, they’re what they’ve always been: a lurker, watching from just outside the narrative frame. In Barlow’s game 

, for example, the player is an unseen NSA whistleblower assembling a dossier on a group of ecoterrorists from leaked surveillance footage; in 

, they're crawling a police database, looking for truth in hours of unreliable witness testimony. In 

, which premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, the player is an editor—and the subject is cinema itself.

 is to restore three “lost” films, each of which Barlow and his team fully scripted and shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles. 

’s central mechanic is an old-fashioned editing moviola: as they watch, rewind, and rewatch hundreds of takes, the player-editor follows match-cuts across the decades, daisy-chaining from the tail end of the studio system to ’70s New Hollywood and eventually ’90s independent cinema. In each clip, actors vamp, and in the background, camera assistants make adjustments, costumers tweak bodices, PAs fetch coffee—all clues to piece together the supernatural drama happening behind the scenes.

Although they’re usually classified as FMVs, Barlow’s games are not the choose-your-own-adventure type. In interviews, he sometimes compares them to sculptures: while players may look at them from different angles, they’re all looking at the same thing. In my own experience of playing Barlow’s games, the analogy feels apt. Navigating his corpora of footage, I always have the sense that there’s something ominous hidden beneath the screen, like an ancient statue on the ocean floor belying still waters at the surface. “Sam is in a category of his own,” says Padmore, reverently.

Rather than writing branching narratives, Barlow sculpts a programmatic logic that surfaces plot points at key moments in the viewer’s otherwise self-directed exploration. As the player progresses along the footage, the game engine stages unexpected reveals, until a hidden meta-story emerges. “Not to invoke a word that is now evil, but I bring an algorithmic mentality to things,” he explains. “I structure and write stories that are big masses of 

, and then I assign values to that stuff, coming up with a game mechanic that gives the player the ability to explore. The key is that the player's exploration can be intentional, and can have structure to it, as well as being surprising.”

When Special Agent Jack Beaner looks at the camera, who does he see? Is it a confessional? Is it Brechtian theater? Am I God?

In a 2023 keynote talk the morning after 

 won a major game award, Barlow cited Nicholas Roeg’s freeze frames, the failed projects of Orson Welles, and Rita Hayworth’s hair. He called 

 his “North Star” and professed that he was trying to create the 

 of video games. When we spoke later that year, he name-dropped Peter Greenaway, Brian De Palma, and Alfred Hitchcock. All to say, although his films could never play in theaters, he’s a massive film geek—and although the games world gives him plenty of latitude and comes with a built-in audience, he doesn’t quite fit in there, either.

Barlow’s first job out of college was working for a tech company. His “proto-Elon Musk” boss ran new hires through a six-week database bootcamp, tasking them with sifting through sales data to find useful correlations: dads picking up six-packs on their diaper runs, for example. “As a fan of surrealism and found stories, I was exploring all this weird data about people's purchasing habits and being like, ‘oh, there's a story there,’” he remembers. “I was sucking narrative out of all these random arrangements of stuff.”

He moved to games semi-accidentally after the dotcom crash, first as an artist and then as a writer and director of games like S

. By the time he made the leap to producing his own indies with the breakout 

 in 2015, he’d already spent years working with voice actors and directing motion-capture cinematics. The game was an unexpected hit, selling over 100,000 copies and nearly single-handedly reviving the maligned FMV genre. When Barlow made 

 in 2019, he had a real production budget, a full film crew, and actors like Logan Marshall-Green from 

’s Kerry Bishé. “I realized all these people are extremely good at their jobs,” he said, “but none of them know what this thing 

This is pretty much what Bob Bejan told me about filming 

: that the writers, film crew, and actors were all figuring it out as they went along. I guess that’s just what it is to work in a new medium. And interactive movies, despite their surprisingly long history, remain persistently 

, seeming eternally around the corner. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s even a good thing. If there’s no right way to make an FMV, there’s no wrong one, either. Anything is still possible.

When we spoke, Barlow told me about how the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, while editing 

, begged his producers to let him release 20 different cuts of his film. How could a director possibly choose one take over another? How could they definitively decide how it all comes together? All movies are shot out of sequence. At the end of production, a movie is just footage on hard drives. Linearity comes later, in the edit bay—or at the moviola. As the new media theorist 

, it’s the editor’s job to trace “a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed.”

The finished movie represents just one potential trajectory, but there are others: the studio cut, the director’s cut, the censored version for airplanes, the fan edit, and all the other sequences never made. Until the moment the edit is locked, a film could be all of those things. It could be anything. Seen this way, a movie is not so different from a game.

 Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet 

(Penguin Random House, 2018), the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, and co-editor of the speculative fiction anthology

(MCD Books, 2022). She is also the co-creator and writer of the video game

, currently available for Playdate and coming Fall 2025 to Nintendo Switch and PC.

ser-fk-raster

Playing God

, my memoir, is both a product of images, and is itself a long image, if a singular image could be stretched through time like a thread of light. The book is written in fragments to induce the feeling of being online and shuttling between browser tabs. It attempts to deconstruct the metaphor “going viral” by tracing the interrelated histories of HIV/AIDS and the Internet. Amid this simulated clicking, my own history emerges: during the early ’90s, my parents died of AIDS.

Images influence text, but they also sustain and nurture the mental processes connected to writing. What follows are examples of images directly connected to 

, and images that provided (life) support as I wrote it.

In graduate school, I wrote about how the Internet has changed our brains, particularly in terms of narrative cognition. At one point in the text, I set the 

Opte Project Visualization of the Internet

 alongside an fMRI scan of the human brain to illustrate the structural similarities between biological and technological networks. Whether this resemblance occurs as a product of chance or unconscious drive, who’s to say. But when I first saw these two images side by side, a lightning bolt had pierced my skull. Their similarities seemed to reveal something about the nature of reality, and I came away with the sense that the Internet, an ocean of textual and graphical information, was closer to the world I was living in than the material one, where people abided by the unidirectional flow of time.

Linearity does not exist on the Internet, just as it does not exist in the coral-like vessels of our brains. Online, everything is more or less an image, and you can pluck one out and follow it backwards into history, sideways into fantasy, or nowhere at all.

I wrote about all this in 2014 and 2015. A decade later, is it any wonder there’s been an explosion of content pertaining to multiverses, portals, and time travel—taking us beyond beginnings, middles, and crucially, endings?

In 2016, I began doing research for an art installation based on the concept of “going viral.” I had no idea what shape the artwork would take, but I knew I wanted to dismantle the viral metaphor from all possible angles, including the biological. I found a free 

 course offered online, which was genuinely delightful because the professor’s extreme enthusiasm for viruses was, well, contagious. In one lecture, he introduced a time-lapse of a viral infection with the description: “The greatest movie ever made.”

Virology 2018 Lecture #2: The Infectious Cycle

This loop of infection left a welt across my mind, though the planned installation never materialized. As I fell harder and deeper into the rabbit hole of research, it very slowly became apparent that I wasn’t collecting information to create art pieces, but to write a book, and that I was writing it because my parents died of a virus. I knew this was true because my visual sensibility, normally overactive, went dark. Not a single image presented itself to me. I had no choice but to turn to words.

Once I was able to admit to myself that I was writing a book, I came across an 

 with Anthony Vaccarello, published about a year into his tenure as creative director for YSL. He reminisced about creating his first collection for the house, which involved visiting the Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent for research. While there, one particular dress, “a fall/winter 81–82 black gigot-sleeved velvet number with a heart-shaped décolletage and a taffeta pouf skirt,” captured his attention. The obvious choice for his debut would be to update the dress in accordance with contemporary trends and build a set of looks around it, but Vaccarello “didn’t want to just take it and cut it like a mini-dress.” He “wanted to play with the collection as a collage, taking one sleeve from that dress, playing with leather...” I read these words and shivered: Could I do the same thing with a block of text—or an idea? Could I break it into pieces, a sleeve here, a neckline here, and grow a body around it? The article did not contain a picture of the inspirational dress, and its effect on me has been so profound that I’ve been afraid to seek it out.

 is ultimately about metaphor, and it employs several metaphors in a weird shell game to repeatedly demonstrate linguistic gaps between thoughts and feelings. I am fascinated by metaphor because it requires an act of conjuration, of producing an idea from a void. 

 perfectly conveys this. It is one of the first photographs I had a proper visceral reaction to in a 

: I stopped breathing—not for very long—but for long enough to think, “Did a photograph just take my breath away?” The work itself is deceptively simple, not much more than a segment of desert captured through a tear in a window’s tent screen, but from this collision a portrait emerges—one of 

, no less. In fact, the true subject of the photo is the frame and its power to generate something out of nothing, like a metaphor. Without the screen’s tear and the other rectangles present within the image (which serve as additional frames), space would remain absorbed in the panorama of life, and completely invisible to the naked eye.

The structure of the book is loosely influenced by a Soviet montage technique known as the Kuleshov effect. Similar to metaphor, the effect works by refracting an idea into existence through the juxtaposition of images. Often these images are unrelated to each other, as in Eisenstein’s film 

 (1925), which features a sequence of factory workers on revolt interspersed with the graphic slaughter of a cow.

The effect was discovered in 1919 by Lev Kuleshov, the newly appointed director of the National Film School in Moscow, and his students, when they intercut a test shoot of matinee idol Ivan Mozzhukhin with images of a bowl of soup, a young girl in a coffin, and a reclining woman.

Despite the neutrality of Mozzhukhin’s expression, audiences were convinced these montages portrayed scenes of hunger, grief, and lust. From this, Kuleshov and his cohort determined that the actual power of cinema was in the organization of shots, or the editing, more than even the content.

I had written over 300 pieces of text for 

 but had no idea how to jigsaw them together. I could viscerally feel they were all connected, but I was unable to see the arrangement. However, something about the propulsion and intuitive logic of montage kept coming to mind, so I started to imagine I was editing a film. Applying the Kuleshov effect to the text allowed me to create unarticulated streams of content simply through the arrangement of information. It was another way for me to “write” about heartache and grief without explicitly engaging with those discourses. The feelings were not on the page, but in the cut.

On a sharp day full of ice rain, I stumbled into the modern wing of the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. In a small room with pale walls, I found the accordion of Ed Ruscha’s 

spread inside a glass case. For a moment I caught the sunshine and car exhaust and felt at peace. Shortly after this encounter, I found a full-page image of his work 

. Straightforward, the phrase of the title appears in white lettering over ominous storm clouds. While seemingly digestible in a single glance, internalizing the text is, to borrow from T. S. Eliot, an “occupation for the saint.” I tore the page out of the magazine and taped it above my living room doorway, so I would have to face it multiple times a day, every day, while writing about the past.

According to the Sotheby’s webpage for 

, Ruscha lifted the phrase from the title of a 1985 Emilio Estevez film, which is itself is an adaptation of a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton. This movement of content—from book to screen to paint to magazine—is, to my mind, emblematic of the creative freedom of Los Angeles, the city where I grew up: Everything is there, in the light, floating around the smog and the infinity pools.

The freeways of Los Angeles lace the city together, and driving over (and under) some of the giant interchanges can feel almost like a divine hallucination. The engineering is so extreme that the typical response is one of marvel: How the fuck could anyone build anything so absurd? Solely functional in purpose, utilitarian in aesthetic, these structures nevertheless have a way of embedding themselves into you. In a certain light, these roads appear as the underlying foundation of the city’s psyche. When writing about networks and the Internet, I’d Google images of the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange, and the Eugene A. Obregon Memorial Interchange, and study them like mandalas.

I had a postcard of the Griffith Park Planetarium above my writing desk in London because I wanted it to connect me to Los Angeles, where I no longer lived. I would fall into this image—which was an illustration and not a photograph—and let my mind wander. I have a deep fascination with postcards as a form of communication; sending the “scenic view” of a holiday destination to a person (you love) back home is a unique type of transmission. It is a picture broken off from its referent and sent hurtling across the globe, making it a literal moving image.

When I find used postcards at flea markets, I am often crushed to the point of tears by the simplicity of their messages. I can’t really explain it, but it feels related to how immaterial our communications have become—in both form and content. To write a postcard, you must hold someone in your thoughts, and the act of holding someone in your thoughts, no matter the duration, is a great and beautiful thing. Especially now.

A great love of mine is noir, in all forms. It is a genre of loose ends and smoke rings: No one finds the falcon in 

is narrated by a dead man floating face down in a swimming pool, and 

. Rarely, if ever, do the plots of these texts add up to anything. There is no redemption, no resolution, only the feeling of life.

My work owes a great deal to Raymond Chandler, but also to the film 

 (1949), one of the most perfect examples of cinema to date. Not only does it seamlessly capture the complete chaos of post-war Europe in under 90 seconds, but it also scrapes away at human relations with a charm so deceptive it isn’t until you leave the theater (or exit the streaming window) that you realize you’ve been mortally shredded. It is my favorite film noir, though it swaps out the hardboiled detective for “a scribbler with too much drink in him.”

There is nothing like the feeling of loneliness in LA. It is a brutalizing force that can very easily lead to madness if not counterbalanced by some ember of grace that, more often than not, is found in the changing spectrum of sunlight. As a rule, it is never to be found in other people, though the city is full of them, which is what makes the lack of connection so intolerable.

A duet of photorealistic murals that lined the 110 freeway pictured this feeling for me. From the early ’80s to the early ’00s, two faces rendered by the phenomenal artist 

 tried to see each other across eight lanes of traffic and a cement pylon. On the northbound side of the 110, beneath the 7th Street overpass, a woman’s face stared out from between her hands—her palms out, open, and spread, as if up against a sheet of glass.

Directly across from her was a man performing the same gesture.

They were always connected but doomed never to meet—at least this is how my teenage brain understood the murals upon first seeing them. The whole situation of traffic, architecture, grime, graffiti, longing, sight, all felt symbolic to the place I was growing up in. What else to do but leave?

The murals were commissioned, along with nine others, in 1983 as part of the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. They were intended to convey the same sense of gravitas as the statutes that once lined the road to the original stadium in Greece. This brief was very liberally interpreted to create artwork on LA’s most highly visible and trafficked walls, which happened to belong to the freeways.

 with the intention of creating a welcoming gateway in the heart of downtown. It turns out the faces, belonging to artists Lita Albuquerque and Jim Morphesis, were looking out at the commuters the whole time, not striving to reach each other. The other thing about loneliness? It makes you the fool.

, people submit essays to win an all-expenses paid trip to a duplicate Earth that has mysteriously appeared in our solar system. Over a montage that shows the protagonist’s solitary, daily life as a high school janitor, we hear her submission:

When early explorers first set out west across the Atlantic, most people thought the world was flat. Most people thought if you sailed far enough west, you would drop off a plane into nothing. These vessels sailing out into the unknown: they weren't carrying noblemen or aristocrats, artists, merchants. They were crewed by people living on the edge of life, the madmen, orphans, ex-convicts, outcasts... like myself. As a felon, I'm an unlikely candidate for most things. But perhaps not for this.

Ever since seeing this film, I haven’t been able to get these words out of my mind. It was the first time I had encountered something on screen that so openly acknowledged the radical value of being on the periphery, of being an outcast (or, in my case, an orphan).

All the works of art and literature that have transformed my thinking were made by freaks, sorcerers, or hermits—by people who didn’t belong. The act of creation, particularly with words, requires such a colossal leap of faith that the only ones truly capable of it are those “on the edge of life.” They are the only ones with enough courage—and sometimes recklessness—to pioneer into the dark, where, quite often, the future is located.

ANOTHER EARTH Official Trailer

On days when the uncertainty of writing a book overwhelmed me, I’d just think of Peggy Olsen from 

 waltzing out of the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a painting of an octopus fellating a woman under her arm.

Peggy Olsen's Graceful Exit

Hovering in the background of season four of 

. The show is set in the early ’90s, and 

, a first-person quest through fantastical environments. Over the course of five episodes, the same fragment of 

 cycles over various computer screens as characters attempt to conquer a particularly trying level. The viewer sees the pilgrim, an enigmatic, warrior-like figure, walk through a field, towards a floating ensō puzzle. The assumption is solving this puzzle will advance the player forward, and yet, no matter how it is solved, the player is always deposited back to the edge of the field. Unsurprisingly, 

 is deemed pretentious, navel-gazing bullshit.

The 8-bit landscape of the game is austere and Crayola bright, and its visual presence in the show registers as a strange horizon line, silently linking scenes and themes across episodes—until it fully erupts into the plot during a montage set to P. J. Harvey’s “Rid of Me.” In this sequence, a main character discovers that the pilgrim can travel on the Y-axis and into other worlds. Harvey’s screams punctuating the pilgrim’s ascent into the sky creates a revelatory sensation: You can only play this game by abandoning gravity, through a paradigm shift.

The idea of a video game exposing how presumption leads to failure is so wild and so unexpected that even though this whole subplot constitutes only three percent of the narrative, the moment is gasp-inducing. Players kept flaming out because they doubled down on logic instead of considering poetry.

The best artworks force us to confront the mechanics of our own thinking. They go beyond providing content or perspective, and guide us to the actual structures that shape our thoughts. Once this becomes visible, observable, these structures can be consciously reengineered. As a consequence, your whole life can change.

A photo of my mother and someone I do not know. ♦

Heather McCalden is a multidisciplinary artist working with text, image, and movement. 

, winner of the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, is her first book.

ser-marvin-visions

13 Ways of Looking: Heather McCalden

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In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

October

Notice that daylight is now less than 12 hours—we've passed the equinox.

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union startled the world by announcing that it had launched 

, the first artificial Earth satellite. It was just a little metal sphere, but it carried a radio transmitter which allowed the world to verify its existence and track its orbit. Alongside the U.S. lunar landing in 1969, this moment is remembered as humanity's first venture into space.

 was quickly followed by the much larger 

, which carried a dog, Laika, who actually managed to survive for a few orbits. Laika became an international folk hero; her story (or stories—there are many versions) is well told in the National Air and Space Museum and in 

magazine. She belongs with Balto and Hachiko in the pantheon of dog heroes.

Tonight’s evening sky features the third quarter Moon passing just north of Saturn.

On this day in 1882, Robert Goddard was born. At the age of 17, on a day which he always called his “Anniversary Day,” he climbed a cherry tree and dreamed of building a machine that would travel to Mars. As we all know, the successors to his rockets 

 travel to Mars—in particular, the Mariner spacecraft of the 1970s. But Goddard had to battle enormous skepticism about his plans. His first test rocket rose 114 feet and landed in a nearby cornfield; a newspaper greeted his success with the headline: “Moon Rocket Misses Target by 239,785 miles.”

 ran a famous article criticizing him for ignoring “the facts ladled out in every high school”—namely, the incorrect claim that you need something to push against for propulsion in the vacuum of space. In the aftermath of the July 1969 Apollo landing, the 

republished their critique, followed by the simple correction: “The 

 regrets the error.” (Notably without explaining 

 their earlier analysis of the physics was incorrect.)

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