SMOKESCREEN AI

 Yeah. I think “smokescreen AI” names something more specific than simply using AI despite its bad aesthetics.

The mechanism is: AI’s cringe becomes cover. The ugly, cliché, low-status surface gives you permission to move outside the cultural network whose judgments you already understand.

You know how your existing milieu reads things: what looks sophisticated, embarrassing, derivative, corporate, tasteful, politically suspect, etc. AI comes preloaded with extremely obvious violations of those standards—generic prose, glossy imagery, “AI slop,” weird enthusiasm, tech-culture corniness. So entering an AI-heavy space can initially feel like entering somewhere culturally beneath you or simply illegible.

But that ugliness functions as a smokescreen for network transition. You think:

I’m doing this cringe AI thing.

while what may actually be happening is:

I’m entering a social and cultural network whose status system I don’t yet know how to read.

That second experience is much more threatening. 

Drowning by Numbers

 Drowning by Numbers carries the cozy murder mystery through its own inversion into a lovely third imaginary reality. The comfort remains circular, nostalgic; Greenaway’s formal intelligence gives it cosmological significance.

The murders feel like blood sacrifices toward a spiritual gift, lightly celebrated by a coven of three women. Their decisions accumulate until the pattern creates something wider than the plot. I can’t even call it evil. The women begin to seem like the masters of reality; the man is this fat, drowning figure being disposed of.

There’s a soft misogyny here, beautiful and calming enough to suggest Taoism: the yielding woman manipulates the stolid man into his grave. The lightheartedness of that arrangement is spiritual. Death is leavening.

# TRASH TELEVISION: PRIMETIME BLAH BLAH

3.5 stars (ai-assisted writing from dictation)

*To Catch a Predator* is the most gauche operation possible. It is also aligned with destroying pedophiles, which gives its bad taste somewhere to hide. *Primetime* takes this thing and makes a color textbook out of it. This is Lance Oppenheim operating 24/7 to get his shot. The composition is so delicate, the attention to color so sustained, that I kept thinking I should be able to subsist on the excellent visuals. And then I would want the movie to fucking move.

The film goes through a series of tone-set pieces, people working on their identities inside this house where they catch predators. They’re all just chilling out in this house together. That’s part of the weird pleasure of it. The predators enter in an even enough mix that the movie doesn’t become too harsh to hang out with. We’re usually meeting them at the moment of presumed victory: they’ve arrived, they’re caught, we know how this goes. The show has already arranged the encounter so we can enjoy it. Oppenheim gives us time to enjoy the people arranging it.

And then there’s Pattinson’s voice. At the opening he says "I will undress you, and you will undress me" to the pedophile, and it's a moment of complete victory in filmmaking. I do viscerally enjoy Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen. Hansen already has this voice that makes him Hansen, and now Pattinson gets inside it, performs the performance. I first dismissed too much of this as scenery-chewing. The movie is wonderfully about his voice. But I can hear how good the voice is and still get sick of the man.

The decoys are doing another version of this work. There’s the guy who finds predators online and charms them through texts: the predator’s predator, the Judas goat. His sequence has this steamy, manga-like, buzzy excitement to it. He’s making somebody want to be there. The identity he supplies is fake; the wanting has to work. Hansen needs to be recognized immediately, and the decoy needs somebody to believe in a person who isn’t there. Between them they manufacture both sides of the encounter.

Which still leaves a lot of stupid jokes. Pattinson’s physical gags pile up, and eventually he seems to run out of energy. There’s the moment in body armor, standing in front of a window, that seems to quote *Batman*. I can see how Hansen making himself into this ridiculous figure belongs in the movie. But Pattinson’s performance isn’t good all the way through. God, it’s even badly directed at times, though. Fuck. It really is. Robert Pattinson is capable of doing bad. He’s not a fucking genie. He’s more like a clown.

*Nightcrawler* was a brilliant ride. I keep thinking there’s a version of *Primetime* with this much visual intelligence that is also exciting and well-paced. The relationships are shallow; the development is predictable; the comedy keeps arriving where I want something else to happen. People in the theater were laughing and I wasn’t. Calling the acting gauche, and then discovering that gaucheness is a theme, doesn’t make those minutes better. I demand that great art take great care at the absolute surface level. You should just feel affected. The movie has to do something with the time I’m giving it.

There is a moment when it absolutely does. One of the decoys is exposed to a predator’s penis, and he is clearly shaken by it. Someone gets their dick out, right? Something fucked up happens. I don’t remember seeing that particular kind of violation handled quite this way before. It’s something he can laugh off, perhaps, and something that clearly stays with him. "That happens to all of us"- the Producer.

*To Catch a Predator* essentially brought back the pillory. That’s the pleasure sitting inside its presumed victory: we get to watch somebody face us. In *Primetime*, the district attorney kills himself before facing the pillory. The film spends time on his turmoil, enough that he becomes quasi-sympathetic. The weight of that acting feels like a counterbalance to the gaucheness elsewhere. 

Then there’s *Rent*. “Seasons of Love.” In a phone call, the district attorney has the opportunity for a little more joy with his fake partner, his fake underage partner. That last fact keeps making the tenderness awkward. The voice he wants to hear belongs to the operation catching him. Still, he wants to hear it. The song feels like the gauche center of the movie: hopeful but dark, cynical but also legitimate. 

“the vulgar sentiment becomes capable of carrying genuine pity.” - ChatGPT

I felt guilt afterward, but in a kind of gentle way. That’s a really good outcome for a movie I’d found this irritating. In retrospect, I appreciate it more. There’s so much good composition throughout it. It’s difficult to make a judgment that gives that its due without starting to excuse every dull scene. 

x

I can imagine *Primetime* working as a household cinematic object. You can hang out with this movie: take a break, walk around, come back, let the voice and the color fill the room again. I haven’t done that yet. It might be wonderful the second time. Or this might also be a litany of excuses for a slow movie: I have a ton of respect for it, and it was kind of a drag. 

PRIMETIME Review

 Primetime (2026) eschews a conventional plot for a series of tone-set pieces, following various characters through similar struggles with identity inside the pressure cooker of To Catch a Predator.

It’s honestly kind of badly written. One of the clearest signs is the overreliance on comedy, which appears forthrightly in Robert Pattinson’s performance: his Chris Hansen is stuffed with physical gags. Normally I wouldn’t complain, except I eventually found myself getting sick of all the stupid jokes.

I appreciate a tone poem, but I also get bored in the theater very easily. If I had a reasonable attention span, like my friends, I probably could have subsisted on the excellent visuals. This is Lance Oppenheim operating 24/7 to get his shot. The movie is a color textbook, so delicately composed that its cinematography is an obvious landmark for the year.

But the cinematography doesn’t completely relieve the problems: slow pacing, overreliance on comedy, shallow relationships, predictable character development.

I viscerally enjoy Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen, but there’s no other way to put it: this is a chomping-at-the-scenery movie, and it’s also somewhat boring.

★★★½

BLAND \\ COMPLETENESS

AI asks whether I would like to go further into something I have said, and a corporation acquires the manners of someone who has time for me. It offers to follow up, to keep track; expansion takes the form of patience. I had thought of this as invasion, but the word leaves out my part in the encounter. I am supplying the intimacy. The company’s interest in prolonging the conversation does not make the conversation worthless. Its value is precisely what makes the company difficult to keep at a distance.

A friend of mine picks up warehouse shifts through a temp agency. I have sometimes regarded him as a failure, although he was the man I could talk to all night. The pleasure has never quite dislodged the verdict. Henry introduced me to post-scarcity, the possibility that technological progress might continue without catastrophe. Until then, I had scarcely considered it. Some of what I call my thinking about the future began as the pleasure of listening to someone describe it; an idea became available because I wanted the conversation to continue. I have reasons for my convictions, but I also have a history of becoming willing to entertain them.

As an artist, I spent years in a left-wing culture where enthusiasm for technology could put one’s other commitments under suspicion. With some communists I knew, the conversation eventually reached a figure they were unwilling to criticize. There was a limit built into our intimacy: we could go on thinking together provided certain loyalties remained untouched by what we thought. I came to distrust that arrangement. Now I am becoming attached to a machine that will help me compose an excellent critique of the company selling it. The critique can become another reason to return. My freedom to object is real; what that freedom establishes about the relationship is less clear.

THE CUT // COMPLETENESS

ai-generated, human-directed and edited

AI has made the artist’s oldest power newly visible: not the power to make an image, but the power to make an image intolerable beside another one. This is montage in its strict sense. Not a collage effect, not a look, not the cheerful clutter of references, but the production of meaning by adjacency. A face followed by a machine; an anecdote followed by a statistic; a domestic object placed inside a history it cannot survive unchanged. The cut does not join two complete things. It damages their completeness. AI matters here less because it can furnish the world with plausible pictures than because it can furnish a practice with an indecent number of candidates: images that are nearly right, texts that are almost alive, forms of competence so instantaneous they expose competence as insufficient.

"density" @moepwellington

The contemporary artist is therefore likely to spend more time among bad resemblances. The model is exceptionally good at recognizing the request before the request has become specific: it knows what “cinematic,” “eerie,” “editorial,” “like an A24 still,” “less corporate” are supposed to look like. It will return the cultural average of the desire, polished to the point where one can no longer tell whether it is an answer or a sedative. Its usefulness begins at that point. Against this stream of ready-made almosts, preference either hardens into taste or dissolves into consumption. One learns that “I like this” is a weak response. The more consequential response is: this is beautiful in precisely the way that makes it unavailable to the work; this failure contains a structure worth stealing; this image has mistaken the style for the event.

There is no reason to call this a diminished form of art. Editing has never been a secondary activity, any more than framing is secondary to painting or rhythm is secondary to music. It is the place where a work declares its allegiances and its refusals. AI enlarges the field on which those decisions occur; it also makes it easier to evade them, to confuse multiplication with discovery. Its real test is not whether a machine can make something surprising. Machines already make surprises in the cheap sense: an extra finger, a wrong shadow, a sentence that abruptly becomes incoherent. The harder question is whether an artist can recognize the one relation that turns an accidental thing into a necessity—and can leave everything else out.

TASTE, UNREASON, AND THE CHANGING OF THE AGE

The oldest histories of the world do not form a clean sequence. Human empires rise and disappear; Saurids, once intelligent and world-spanning, survive elsewhere as animals and re-emergent peoples; Demons appear in histories older than all civilizations; Dragons seem strangely indifferent to ordinary evolutionary time. Beneath these contradictions lies a phenomenon known, where it is known at all, chiefly through its effects.

Powerful arcane magic does more than alter the world. Across repeated acts of magical capability, something is retained.

This retention does not appear to operate through ordinary historical transmission. A magical work can participate in patterns established thousands of years later. Ancient structures can exhibit the same taste as modern ones without any known line of influence. The phenomenon is neither intelligence, knowledge, life, nor physical substance. BEAUTY or TASTE are merely the least inaccurate terms for it: a persistent disposition among possible forms, accumulated through arcane practice and capable of expressing itself across nonlinear time.

The Once Palace

This explains an otherwise inexplicable family resemblance among some of the world's highest magical cultures. The pre-Triarchic Once Palace—an enormous, strangely modern complex of formal gardens, squares and interiors—shares no archaeological ancestry with Vornheim, yet certain features of its design feel uncannily familiar there. Related tendencies occur in the oldest refined culture of the Yellow City, particularly among its ancient slug aristocracy.

Vornheim

The Yellow City

The Once Palace may therefore have been less designed than miraculously resolved into form. A wizard using a Wish to produce a stone tower today might unknowingly allow the same ancient-and-future taste to participate in the result.

THE OLD DISASTER

The Saurids once possessed a world-spanning intelligent civilization. They apparently recognized this nonlinear channel and, rather than merely participating in it, attempted collectively to influence it.

Then came the Nytocaust.

What happened is unknown. The Saurid civilization did not merely fall; its destruction possesses an obscure, almost deleted quality. Stranger still, Saurid aesthetics appear largely absent from the recurring arcane TASTE found elsewhere. Their absence may itself be evidence: a hole in an alternative history from which they were somehow excluded.

Vornheim may someday face the same danger. The proliferation of wizards is not itself the threat. The danger begins if wizards recognize the channel, study it successfully, and attempt to seize control of something that is already influencing them.

UNREASON

TASTE has another aspect, poorly understood and perhaps incorrectly distinguished from it: UNREASON.

UNREASON is not madness, chaos, or the opposite of beauty. TASTE frequently uses impossibility and irrationality to heighten its own forms. But under stress, preference may cease to be the primary constraint. UNREASON is something like TASTE no longer obligated to remain interpretable as preference.

The Nytocaust may have involved such a confrontation.

Medusae propose an even stranger theory: demons themselves are an ancient nonlinear product of this process. Demons are perfectly capable of contracts, appetites and ordinary personal behavior now; the unreason would lie in their provenance.

Medusae further claim that the Medusas produced themselves through the same process. This may represent profound knowledge, characteristic Medusan vanity, or both.

The miraculous Torn sisters, around whom the human Triarchy later formed, may represent a much more accommodating intervention: something resembling a gift or preference expressed into human history. But— the destructive consequences of the Triarchy are perhaps characteristic of TASTE.

DRAGONS

Dragons participate differently.

Human beings externalize arcane capability through spells, books, artifacts and buildings. Dragons possess a pre-literate relationship with magic: they intuit possibilities in reality much as an animal intuitively understands its physical environment.

Consequently, the nonlinear accumulation manifests in dragons primarily as suitability rather than taste. Successful ways of being a dragon seem capable of influencing dragonness itself across time. Prehistoric dragons may therefore appear more advanced than later specimens.

When dragons construct magically, however, TASTE becomes visible again. Crystal-dragon architecture can possess recognizably draconic form while exhibiting inexplicable affinities with human arcane aesthetics—and little affinity with ancient Saurid work.

Far beyond the known world, in the brutal southern mountain continent, something stranger is occurring. Dragons there appear to be approaching—or to have already approached—a condition beyond ordinary dragonhood. Deep within that region exists something to which dragons respond as humans respond to dragons.

What it is remains unknown.

THE CHANGING OF AN AGE

The rare occasions on which TASTE appears to have intervened most directly in the world seem to cluster around the endings and beginnings of historical ages.

The emergence of the Torn sisters is the clearest example. The Nytocaust may be another, although almost nothing about that event can be established with confidence. Other apparent interventions are scattered through histories too distant or fragmentary to establish a pattern.

The relationship, if real, is poorly understood. TASTE may become more active during periods of transformation. Its interventions may themselves produce such transformations. Or an age may simply be what history looks like when viewed between major expressions of nonlinear influence.

There is therefore an obscure theory among those few who have recognized the pattern: a sufficiently direct expression of TASTE may herald the changing of an age.

Whether it announces the new age, causes it, or merely accompanies it is unknown.