1

This is dedicated to Michael Clayton, the 2007 corporate drama filled with reflective surfaces that usher us through the fine-grained details of a class-action lawsuit. Tinted windows and boardroom glass. Hotel lobbies, millionaire homes, and Chinatown gambling dens. George Clooney is a reliably crisp protagonist, his noble jaw carrying the correct amount of cynicism and charm as he moves through the lives of the rich and the damned. But the movie belongs entirely to Tom Wilkinson, who launches this serviceable legal thriller into the realm of mystical allegory.

My God. I know what this is, this is some sort of amniotic, embryonic fluid. I’m drenched in afterbirth, I’ve breached the chrysalis, I’ve been reborn . . . no no no, reset, this is not rebirth . . . I’ve emerged from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity.

He’s unmedicated, manic, but frighteningly lucid—a sweaty metaphor for the drastic measures required to escape the atmosphere of end-game America. Metaphors and aphorisms abound in this zone. There’s Frederic Jameson’s chestnut that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Or Adorno’s dictum that, now more than ever, we’re given “the freedom to choose what is always the same.” Or John Carpenter’s magic sunglasses that inevitably became a mass-marketed fad via Shepard Fairey. But I prefer Tom Wilkinson off his meds.

Nerves outside of his skin, he is an entirely sensate creature who is no longer retreating from the big-budget questions of existence. He is pursuing answers. He is engaged. And running naked through a parking lot.

2

But here comes Saint Jerome, determined to reject the world in exchange for salvation. Although he removed himself from his family, friends, and the ‘dainty foods’ he loved, he could not bear to leave his books behind. He carried Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid through the Syrian desert. It lingers in the mind, this image of a man carrying his books into the wilderness only to punish himself for reading them.

Several years ago, C. gave me a small framed reproduction of my favorite painting, Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome in His Study, from 1605. Jerome was typically depicted in the wilderness. But in Caravaggio’s hands, he resides in the blackness of a void or outer space. Hushed and desiccated, he gazes intently at the page of a book. Although he’s probably completing his translation of the Old Testament into Latin, I prefer to think he’s returned to Ovid or Cicero, unaware of the skull on his desk that mocks the vanity of knowledge in the face of the unknowable.

Clenched fists. A slash of light across the cheek. This portrait is the patron saint of Midnight Radio, and it is the root of film noir, where darkness gives no option except to look within. John Berger has said Caravaggio’s darkness “smells of candles, over-ripe melons, damp washing to be hung out the next day.” To me, it feels like the purple-black thoughts that burble within the midnight brain. And in this darkness, Jerome no longer belongs to history or dogma but to the silence he sought in the desert.

3

Zhuangzi would disagree, and he comes to mind thanks to C, who sometimes shares his writing with me—like his idea of finding liberation by “charioting upon what is true both to Heaven and to earth, riding atop the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths so that your wandering could nowhere be brought to a halt.”

My tendency is to detach from the embarrassment and overwhelm of the 21st century. Protect my attention span. Seek stillness. Learn to watch a fireplace the way I watch television or stare at my computer screen. But this is looking backward to an overly romanticized pre-internet age, and it is reactionary.

Because what am I protecting? Better to steer into the skid. Ride the back-and-forth. Embrace every atmospheric breath, no matter how tacky or difficult or mundane. Cultivate the philosophy of Tatsuo Miyajima: Keep changing. Connect with everything. Continue forever.

4

So I’m doing hard new things. Forcing myself to run for an hour although my mind and thighs rebel. Last week I took my fear of heights for a spin and accepted an invitation to go rock climbing. I don’t think it’s for me, but I deeply enjoyed hearing people say things like meat hook,* flash*, jug, crimp, and sloper. I successfully climbed two walls, fighting the mad urge to look down. Later my friend S. said that while it was nice that I made it to the top, it might be better to try a hard path and fall. So I’m finally teaching myself to use GitHub and the command line.

While running and moaning and cursing, I try to remind myself that I get to run. Because soon this body will fail. And soon the robots will infect everything that was fun to make and learn.

5

I took a deep, cleansing breath and I put that notion aside. I tabled it. I said to myself, “As clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe I have witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time.” And Michael, the time is now.

So the hour has come for some Tom Wilkinson and George Clooney interlaced with five pieces of profound bass and machine grind. And plenty of amniotic, embryonic reverb.

• Try to make believe this is not just madness because this is not just madness.
• Richie Hawtin + Thomas Brinkmann - 96:12/24:00 VR Concept | 1998 | Bandcamp
• As potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe I witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time.
• HTRK - Poison (Mika Vainio Remix) Ghostly International, 2013 | Bandcamp
• Yes, the nudity in the parking lot was a mistake, I admit it. It was wrong. It was lame. It was obvious. And therapeutically, it was completely useless.
• TM404 - 202/303/303/303/606/606 Kontra, 2013 | Bandcamp
• Is that the correct answer to the multiple choice of me?
• Tropic of Cancer - Stop Suffering Blackest Ever Black, 2015 | Boomkat
• What makes this feel good is that I don’t know where this goes.
• µ-Ziq - Peppermint Aero Manzana | Balmat, 2025 | Bandcamp
• You think you got the horses for that? Well good luck and god bless.

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Midnight Radio 34: Absorb the Poison

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