Category: Editor’s Pick

California in the year 2075 offers the intrepid traveler a cornucopia of sad marvels, unnerving grotesqueries, and outright horrors. From the sea-scoured coastline, which, due to hurricane, typhoon and tsunami, has been eroded inland an average of 22 miles; to the mad and anarchic self-governing homeless encampment of Greater Los Angeles; to the scorched and moribund Redwood Forest; to the eerily abandoned ghost town of San Francisco; to the desiccated vestiges of America’s once-rich farmland; to the scalding wastes of The Inland Empire – California is truly an adventure tourist’s Eden.

It begins with a splintering intersection of time and reality. The world shatters, seeks to cobweb, to consume the glass coffin that encases and confines. I inhale and hold and pray, but forget what I’m praying for? The sensation stalls like a pinched vein unable to release the life-giving blood within. But it hasn’t stopped. Not really.

It was her customers who had started the whole acting thing. Almost every night at Chiro’s when she took their orders she was asked if she was an actor or dancer or grad student. Was it her fault that patrons, especially tourists, expected that a young server working (only temporarily!) in a Chelsea trattoria, would be headed for a big career?

Alex Donaldson shot two videos the morning of the day it all collapsed.

“What kind of idiot would send a real Joan Mitchell to us?” Matthew asked.

“Maybe it’s our lucky day?” Vanessa’s heart pattered with excitement. Maybe under my direction, we’re finally being taken seriously as an auction house?

Hadrian attempts to silence me, but I continue. “You are a Greek trapped in the body of a Roman, in a time not meant for you."