Plans for the Boyle Heights park were vague and impossible to clarify. The National Park Service branch responsible for the project was busy dealing with a massive fire in the Chequamegon-Nicolet forest started by a pottery-club-turned-eco-terrorist group based in Park Falls, and because the budget allocations were all marked TBD I had no idea where to start with the layout. In the meantime I volunteered to sub in for the road crew responsible for repainting the roads encompassing the park. It turned out that the demolition of the homes—managed for the most part by Apple Music, and funded mainly by a significant Q3 percentage growth in Services revenue following last year's arrest of Spotify's entire Data Science branch of its Engineering Office for embezzlement, deception by perfidy, and animal torture—caused large sections of the earth on Euclid Ave. to swell and dip so that the whole road down to the soil bed had to be reconstructed. And while parking lines and pedestrian crossings were also needed along Eagle St., not a single road crew could be bothered to cross the two year long picket line begun around the time StreetsLA was privatized. I had nothing else to do anyway, so I took the job. I got the instructions packet for the project from a Google Drive link in Discord. It involved two personnel, a driver and a LineGuide operator to control the paintliner's spray system. The system was intuitive: two HD cameras, two laser grids to ensure alignment, and four hydraulic paint guns operable through the LineGuide app on a tablet in the cabin. There were two large pressurized containers on the truck bed that held 500 gallons of paint each, and a diesel powered thermoplastic cooking system and mixer to prime the paint to 380°F that was activated by a toggle switch on the center console. Naturally I was to do both jobs at once: drive the truck and paint the lines. When I got to the tow lot in Commerce to pick up the paintliner, the giant sheet metal gate rolled open but the bungalow office was empty. A handwritten sign on the office window read: "Taylor—loca moca java monster + 2 scratchers John—keys are in the paintliner." I walked around the lot for half an hour and found the paintliner behind a giant wall of poorly wound copper wire bales. The keys were on the driver's seat and the cabin smelled like cardboard. Driving the rig off the lot and onto the 5 at 10 mph tops felt like what I imagined sailing the MSC Irina felt like. The next two hours in traffic I spent inspecting the LineGuide setup, which was an iPad affixed to the passenger dashboard with an extended panel for a joystick and two foot pedals for what I guessed were the white and yellow spray guns. By the time I got to Eagle St. I figured out a system to operate the LineGuide while also piloting the truck: I would straddle the center console and divide myself between tasks, steering with the left side of my body and controlling the spray guns with my right. As I rolled onto the unmarked pavement this way, however, I soon learned that my services were no longer needed.

maybe the right word here is ‘lens’.

for your consideration,

the early shot in three colors: blue of julie's daughter in the back of the car watching the freeway traffic through the rear window, where from the outside of the car we see the tunnel lights stretching, flaring and streaking in complex repetitions across the window's glass, and julie's daughter's face in drowsy absorption.

in the next shot the images appear hemispherically distorted, but notice also that the window and its defroster lines are visible in both shots. the point is not just that the child experiences the world through a wide-angle lens, but to bring our attention to the lens itself.

later, in the hospital, julie receives the news that her husband and daughter died in the crash. an image of the doctor is reflected off of julie's iris in extreme closeup. he appears as if floating, decontextualized, severed from the hospital room, a nervous apparition poofed into being to deliver tragic news.

there is an enormous semantic difference in seeing a person's body and face as they look, watch, or gaze at an object and something like this. a person's face distorts my idea of their gaze. their consciousness, their insideness. the body monopolizes and the face steals the show. here, however, only the gaze and its object exists. we see…seeing. now that i think of it, is it at all strange to you that the eyes have a surface?

upon hearing the news, the first thing Julie does is shatter a window to distract the nurse from her station, where she tries to kill herself with a bottle of pills. what she fails to accomplish here she will attempt again through other means, by shattering the many other symbolic windows that provide throughways to her self.

she is later visited by Olivier, one of her husband's collaborators, who gives her a Philips 3LC2000/19G portable TV to watch her husband and daughter's funeral on a public channel. julie's husband was a world-renowned composer, whose last unfinished work was commissioned by the UN to celebrate the unification of Europe after the cold war. having julie watch her husband's funeral from under the covers of a hospital bed on a screen no bigger than a petit ecolier biscuit is kieslowski's way of distantiating julie from the noise of her husband's fame. fame weaves an impenetrable image that provides the empty hearts that feed on it with an illusion of familiarity and possession. this image, this symbolic network, is meaningless vapor.

in the next scene, julie is startled from a nap by orchestral strings only she can hear as blue light floods the screen in pulses. julie, noticing the camera, follows with her eyes as it swings to the side and back. the blue light accompanies the music, ebbs when the music fades. it doesn't flood the world so much as it saturates the lens itself.

what follows is julie's attempt to sever herself from her suffering: she orders her lawyer to put the estate on the market, guts the house of all belongings save one mattress, sleeps with Olivier on it, says goodbye to him the next morning, destroys her husband's unfinished work, assumes her maiden name and moves to an apartment in Paris where no one she knows can find her.

one night, she is woken up by the sound of a brawl on the street. she watches as three men pummel another man who manages to escape into her apartment complex. they chase him up the stairs as he knocks on different doors and begs for refuge; he knocks on her door but she does nothing; when the noise disappears she goes out into the hallway to investigate and accidentally locks herself out. of course, what happens to the man is happening to her: both are on the run from a violence that hounds them. what looks like a liberating freedom—a freedom from her past and possessions—turns out instead to be its opposite. she falls asleep on the staircase to a music only she can hear as beads of blue lights play across the screen.

in the next scene, julie is visited by a neighbor who asks her to sign a petition to evict lucille, the woman who lives a floor below her, for being a whore, which julie refuses.

this is a reference to the tenant, though i'm not really clear on what's being said by it. is julie's attempt to reinvent herself at bottom the desire to be cored like an apple, to become ontologically hollow like trelkovsky? trelkovsky was so vacant of self he became possessed by the spirit of a suicide; yet julie is full of a pain and grief she can't escape. the reference seems to reinforce the idea that the act of running away from something is itself a form of bondage. and anyway, isn't it absurd, since the thing she so desires to be free from is inside her? and how do you go about stripping yourself of that?

meanwhile, olivier has been looking all over for her. he finds her in a cafe and they sit over coffee. the effect here is so slight a screenshot wouldn't show it, but when a waiter brings the coffee over, an image of his arm is doubled on screen, as if the act were being viewed from behind a pane of glass, the waiter's arm reflected ghostlike on its surface.

olivier remarks that the song being played on the flute by a beggar outside the cafe sounds a lot like her husband's unfinished symphony; when olivier leaves, she asks the beggar where he heard the song he's playing, to which he replies, "i make up a lot of stuff."

i'm not really sure what to make of this scene. is the point to have julie encounter outside of herself the music that haunts the inmost chambers of her heart, the same music she threw into the jaws of a garbage truck a few months earlier? have you ever read a book and felt complete surprise that, yes, that's exactly how it feels? and did it ever feel like a fist unclenching its fingers around a memory you thought was buried for good, a feeling you thought was only yours? the song she hears inside herself, a private, incommunicable experience, is communicated to her here, at random, meaninglessly, not as the grieving widow of the composer who wrote it, but as a passerby, faceless and insignificant. there is something liberating about this.

when julie returns to her apartment, she finds a mischief of newborn mice and their mother on the floor of her storage closet. the mice are raw and pink and transparent and unfurred and sort of squirming helplessly around, some with their little paws in the air. as julie kneels to get a closer look, a sliver of cold, white, objective light rests on a portion of her face, as if she were peeping through a crack at the bare, unfiltered life of basic survival. in other words, at herself: at a life stripped of its meaning, fantasies, symbols.

her reaction to this is, perhaps not absurdly, to meet with her realtor the next day and ask him for help in looking for another apartment. failing this, she asks a neighbor to borrow his cat, and lucille to clean up the mess. the intense distress she feels at this is new, though her grief still incomplete: if the event that triggers it is trivial, the feelings it inspires are ultimately directed at herself, in particular at her acts of self-destruction following the death of her husband and daughter. it's a distress she has refused herself to feel up until this moment. she is no longer confident that the stripped-down life she has crafted for herself can be called freedom.

this white, objective light appears again on julie's face in the strip club where lucille works as a dancer. the latter's voice is urgent when she calls julie late one night for help. as she explains, one of the dancers on stage in five asks her for a hand in getting hard, and she rubs his cock.

after i changed, i came here for a drink. i looked around the audience for no reason. right there...in the first row, i saw my father [here the dancer thanks lucille and leaves]. he looked tired...almost nodding off...but he kept staring at the girl's ass. the bastard who let you in wouldn't make him leave. if you pay, you get to watch, you know?

lucille, julie asks, why do you do this? because i like it, lucille says. her face is lit by a warm, orange light.

the story she tells reminds me of a myth in ovid's metamorphoses, in which the god mercury, flying above a festival for athena, catches a glimpse of the beautiful herse and falls in love with her. he decides to pay a visit to her home without disguising himself. he fixes his hair, puts on his best gold-trimmed suit and, entering the first room of the house, meets herse's sister aglauros, who agrees to help with his romantic pursuit for a heavy sum of gold (mercury's words in this exchange are also undisguised: be loyal to your sister and agree to be my child's aunt, he basically says). meanwhile the goddess minerva witnesses the deal and remembers aglauros's prior profanity, in which she looks into a covered cradle minerva expressly forbade her to look into, since it hid a child she wanted to keep secret. the vengeful minerva then asks the goddess envy for help in infecting aglauros, which eventually leads to her forbidding mercury entry into the home. mercury punishes aglauros by turning her into stone, and he flies away. there are two transgressions here that get tied together by the myth in a nice way: mercury's refusal to disguise himself both in appearance and language, and aglauros's gaze into minerva's cradle. in both cases, aglauros sees too much, too nakedly.

the obscenity of lucille's father sitting front row at the strip club she works at is not the puritanical shame in the sexual nature of her work (which she enjoys), but that her father in that moment becomes like any other man: he is stripped of his symbolic identity as father, caretaker, family, and appears to her in the new, denatured context as an ordinary man, an ordinary customer, an ordinary pervert. it's in this context that lucille notices julie's face on a television set in another room, where the news segment will inform the latter that her husband was having an affair.

during the segment the anchorwoman says: he was a great man. one of the most important composers of our time. i think people like him belong to all of us.

to someone whose life and grief are tethered to a private world of memories and feelings, this is deeply liberating: learning that the world you lost was wrong, a fantasy that you alone upheld. a couple scenes later, julie runs after olivier's car on the street to ask him why he decided to finish her husband's concerto. it's the first time in the movie julie runs toward something, rather than away from it. the duplicative effect described earlier in the cafe occurs here again when olivier brakes, and multiple copies of the volvo's red lights flare up across the screen.

the effect is a species of lens flare that can be achieved by stacking multiple filters on a camera lens so that the light bounces off of the different layers of glass and echoes on screen as above. repetitions like these are called ghosts, though in the context of the movie what's important is that another lens is introduced by olivier in the interest of a shared fantasy, a shared perspective, a mutual love, a life in common.

i heard you're finishing patrice's concerto, she says. i thought i might try, he says. you can't. you have no right. it will never be the same, she says. i'll tell you why, he says. i told myself, 'it's a way.' a way to make you cry, to make you run. the only way to make you say 'i want' or 'i don't want.'

he wants to make her feel something, to take up a position, do something, grieve. she wants to preserve the fantasy she has of her husband, and therefore the fantasy of her self, which is just now beginning to crumble. she agrees to work on the composition, and the work she does on it is with a blue pen.

tell me about today's light

i watched this today and though i don't pretend to understand everything that goes on in it, i did have some thoughts about a few things they talk about.

• the first thing thiel says is that the progress of humanity has generally stagnated. this is his central thesis throughout the interview. he describes a window of increased velocity in human technological progress that essentially begins with the industrial revolution in 1750 and ends with the concorde, a supersonic airliner, in the 70s. "we're moving faster. the ships were faster, the railroads were faster and the cars were faster, the planes were faster..." until suddenly in the 70s the hippies won and all progress came to a halt. he makes an exception for "the world of bits": the internet, computers, software, and more currently crypto and AI, which, he qualifies, "in some sense is pretty big," though it, the world of bits, poses to him the question of whether or not it's big enough to reinvigorate the same kind of acceleration we were seeing for 200 years.

in some sense means: i want way more. for thiel, an overvaluation of the overhaul on the social fabric caused by AI and crypto could possibly be a speed bump to its exponential progress, so he tries to downplay it.

he then goes on to the "epistemological question" of how we know whether we're in a state of stagnation or acceleration - and attempts to answer this by, rather abruptly, talking about hyperspecialization. "can you say you're not making progress in physics unless you've devoted half your life to studying string theory? or what about quantum computers? or what about cancer research and biotech, the sort of all these verticals. and how much does progress in cancer count versus string theory? so you have to give weightings [hand gesture signaling minute, particular precision] to all these things." which, he says, makes answering the question difficult. and part of that difficulty is the "ever narrower groups of guardians guarding themselves," - referring here to the hyperspecialized groups of people who devote their lives to a specific pursuit in research or academia.

it's a weird way of answering a straightforward question: how do we know whether we're in a state of stagnation or acceleration? what do "guardians guarding themselves" have to do with measuring medical achievements, theoretical advancements, progress in research? can you say you're not making progress in physics unless you've devoted half your life to studying string theory? half a life devoted to cancer research, by the way he frames it here, is a waste. it's a bad investment whose investors are committed to a sunk cost fallacy.

a person who devotes their life to the study of a theory, a vertical, a guardian guarding himself: this person, this emotional, selfish, ideological force, is what thiel believes prevents him from devouring these sectors of the social body with AI and advanced tech - which absorption would be properly counted as accelerative human progress on the same scale as the industrial revolution. if he can get these people out of the way, if he can successfully attack and dismantle public institutions through an autocratic government, then perhaps he can try to privatize them.

if his language is calibrated to sound intellectual, cultured, and possibly even philosophical, his underlying meaning is an ordinary monopoly on the social body.

• at one point thiel frames research and academia through an economic language: what are the returns of going into research and academia? "there certainly are diminishing returns to going into science or going into academia generally." these fields are useful to thiel only in the context of their "breakthroughs," or the overarching ideology of exponential human progress. he calls liberal arts studies "a sociopathic Malthusian kind of an institution, because you have to throw more and more and more at something to get the same returns." (Malthus was the guy who [wrongly] posited that because the growth model of population increase was exponential while the production of food was linear, certain humanitarian crises like famine and population decline were inevitable. this analogy is literally nonsensical, but seems unavoidable given that it's regulated by thiel's economic framework.) again, it's a bad investment - and maybe not a coincidence that musk said just a couple days ago that his new, updated AI machine is smarter than any PhD graduate in every subject. the point is that, to thiel and musk, these lifetime careers are competing products in their tech market.

• more "verticals," like alzheimer's and dementia research, which thiel says have made zero progress in the last 40-50 years, and the beta amyloid research that he says is a "stupid racket" that researchers have been stuck on: these are lies that, in the context of the middle class and institutions not taking on the "risk" of fully welcoming acceleration and acting against their comforts of living, again signal a desire to make headway in a market whose main safeguards are, for some reason, cultural, ideological. when ross douthat asks him to be concrete about what he means - should the FDA be more lenient about its regulations on alzheimer's drugs? - he hedges, stutters, and repeats himself: "yeah, you, you would, you would take, you would take a lot more risk, uh, you know if you had, if you had some, fatal disease, there probably are a lot more risks you can, you can take, there a lot more risks the researchers can take..." he forgets his line of thought like someone caught in a lie, and continues to circle around the familiar until he finds purchase with what he should be saying: culturally what our society should look like is early modernity. people with radical hopes and ideals for the future of technology and medicine.

this is what his gripe with greta thunberg is about: a climate change activist who has radically limited our imagination of the future by giving it a palpable deadline. not that it's her fault exactly, but that greta is symbolic of the culture's understanding of climate change, which thiel and co. are directly responsible for hastening. what thiel wants, at least in this interview, is to channel the battle to the level of ideology and our cultural imagination, perhaps because he already has the practical, concrete, and structural channels under control through donations of hundreds of millions of dollars to vance and others who are presently helping him infect the country through policy and executive orders.

• "it's still the best option we have, i think, i don't know, is harvard going to cure dementia by just puttering along, doing the same thing that hasn't worked for 50 years?" as an answer to "does populism in trump 2.0 look like a vehicle for technological dynamism to you?" is a strategic redirection: not only does it demand an impossible standard - and, make no mistake, the impossibility is meant to shortchange and discredit harvard's research - it's also meant to make trump appear to be a conduit for an absolute social good, while ignoring the more malevolent fascist beliefs and policies that are a huge part of his, trump's, and miller's ideology. maybe this isn't a good analogy, but thiel is like a spoiled child who can't wait his turn to use a new toy because his older brother is using it: he's not even using it the right way, you hear him complain to his dad.

how can you make a prestigious institution's research seem outdated, stupid, and useless? with a billion dollar idea: an ideology that explicitly encompasses multiple generations and the entirety of the future existence of humanity. how do you make it seem like you're not a white supremacist, even though you meet with and fund in the hundreds of millions of dollars significant and extremely powerful figures, mouthpieces, and institutions of white supremacy? by talking about a cure for dementia. by devaluing harvard's research he intends to make his own business in the medical research field seem like a solution: a complete overhaul of a supposedly tired, sclerotic method of science by the implementation of new tech and new, streamlined protocols for gathering data. he's selling a product.

• "The investigation concerns whether Cortexyme and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

On October 26, 2021, Cortexyme issued a press release "report[ing] top-line results from its Phase 2/3 GAIN Trial, a double-blind, placebo-controlled study evaluating the efficacy of atuzaginstat (COR388), an investigational orally administered small-molecule that targets gingipain proteases from the bacterium Porphyromonas gingivalis (P. gingivalis)." The press release reported, in relevant part, that the study had failed to meet statistical significance in its co-primary endpoints of improving cognitive and functional abilities in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease.

On this news, Cortexyme's stock price fell $44.17 per share, or 76.58%, to close at $13.51 per share on October 27, 2021.

On January 26, 2022, Cortexyme disclosed receipt of a letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") advising that the FDA had "plac[ed] a full clinical hold on atuzaginstat's (COR388) Investigational New Drug application (IND 134303)."

On this news, Cortexyme's stock price fell $2.85 per share, or 31.46%, to close at $6.21 per share on January 26, 2022.

Then, on February 1, 2022, Cortexyme issued a press release announcing plans to reduce its workforce by 53% in response to the FDA's clinical hold. That same day, Cortexyme announced the resignations of Casey Lynch, the Company's Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board, and Steve Dominy, the Company's Chief Scientific Officer and a director.