Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Guide for Jennifer Rising Arist Part ONE

If you’re stepping into music and you don’t know this stuff, you’re about to get played. Hard. There are three books that will save you from signing your soul away. All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald Passman is the bible. Every contract trick, every hidden cut, every royalty scam—he breaks it down so even a moron can see it coming. Read it. Learn it. Live it.

How to Make It in the New Music Business by Ari Herstand is your playbook for doing it yourself. Forget the labels, forget the gatekeepers. He tells you exactly how to build fans, get your music out, make a living without getting screwed. If you aren’t running your own shit, someone else is, and they’re taking the cash you worked for.

Music Royalty Collection Guide by Eli Rogers is the money map. All those streams, shows, and plays? Most artists don’t see a dime because they don’t know how to collect. Rogers shows you exactly how to make sure the money you earned lands in your pocket and not someone else’s.

After that, you need to understand how the game really works. The Musician’s Handbook by Bobby Borg is the jungle map. Managers, labels, tours—it’s all a machine designed to chew you up if you don’t know the rules. Borg tells you how to survive it without losing your ass.

On the Record by Guy Oseary is the real-world storybook. Artists, producers, executives telling you who got rich and who got burned. No sugarcoating. Read it and see the patterns before it’s your turn to get played.

The Big Payback by Dan Charnas digs into history—hip-hop, pop, money, power, and exploitation. It shows who controls the cash, who gets played, and how the industry actually works behind the scenes.

Read the first three. Internalize them. The next three are your reality check. Ignore this, and you’ll be the cautionary tale someone tells at parties. Simple.

From the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Super-Tribe: McLuhan’s Vision and the Digital Transition

In reading Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, I was struck by how prescient his vision was. McLuhan wasn’t just talking about the past or his own era; he was predicting a structural transformation in human society that is only now fully apparent. He described the effects of print culture on thought, memory, and community, and then imagined the consequences of moving beyond print into the electronic age. Today, as we live in 2027—or close to it—it’s remarkable to see how accurately his framework maps onto the digital world. And yet, what he proposed as the general shape of things doesn’t capture all of the nuances, challenges, and dangers of what actually came to pass.

1. The Shift from Print to Orality

McLuhan’s fundamental insight was that print culture had shaped society in a very particular way: linear, logical, individualistic, and grounded in permanence. Books, newspapers, and other printed forms allowed for sequential thought, abstract reasoning, and the delegation of memory. We no longer needed to rely on our own cognitive abilities for recall; the written word became the storehouse of knowledge. Literacy created individuality, nationalism, and a world organized around abstract systems rather than immediate lived experience.

He predicted that electronic media would disrupt this linearity. In his words, “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.” He foresaw that the collapse of space and time through electric media—radio, television, and later digital forms—would return humans to a more oral-based culture. It wasn’t that writing would disappear, but that the dominant mode of attention, communication, and identity would shift away from print.

When I read this, the first thing that struck me was the way he described the return to orality as a structural inevitability. He noted that in pre-Gutenberg oral cultures, memory and cognitive engagement were widely distributed. Poets, bards, and the Druids developed extraordinary memorization skills, and the general populace relied heavily on their own capacity to remember stories, laws, and histories. The shift to print allowed memory to be offloaded to paper, which freed humans cognitively but also diminished the range of skills the average person could reliably exercise.

Now, in 2027, we are experiencing the transition McLuhan foresaw. The digital world has returned us to oral-style engagement: instant, shared, and highly performative. Yet the context is radically different. Unlike the oral societies McLuhan described, most of us do not train our minds to retain knowledge deeply or systematically. The consequence is that intellectual engagement is uneven, and ideas can spread rapidly without verification, often manipulated simply by the force of repetition or plausibility.

2. Speed and the Super-Tribe

McLuhan emphasized that electric media introduces simultaneity: “Electric speed… involves all of us, all at once.” He was describing a world where everyone becomes aware of events as they happen, a radical contrast to the sequential, delayed consumption of printed material. He was right—speed is now permanent, relentless, and global. Information is no longer linear or delayed; it is continuous, multi-directional, and personalized. Reaction replaces reflection. Opinion becomes identity. And because this system is essentially oral, truth is negotiable, malleable, and socially enforced rather than objectively verifiable.

This leads directly to the emergence of what I would call the “super-tribe.” McLuhan predicted re-tribalization—people would cluster emotionally, socially, and cognitively into new collective units—but he did not, of course, see the precise forms this would take. Today, tribes form around niche interests, political ideology, hobbies, or even shared conspiracy theories. Cosplay communities, photography circles, sports fandoms, political affiliations, or causes like women’s rights now operate as globally networked micro-tribes. Unlike traditional oral tribes, which were geographically bound and socially cohesive, these tribes are non-geographical and often exist only digitally. Members share intense connection over interests but remain disconnected from the physical environments in which they live.

There is a remarkable tension here. On the one hand, this allows unprecedented freedom. You can find people who think like you anywhere on the planet, form communities, and access knowledge and experiences that would have been impossible in a purely local context. On the other hand, this non-geographical tribalism creates a dangerous disconnect. Your super-tribe has no stake in maintaining your local infrastructure, governing systems, or even basic civic life. Roads decay, hospitals back up, local politics falters—not because people are inherently negligent, but because their attention and emotional investment have migrated elsewhere. The more invested you are in global identity, the less you are tethered to the limits and obligations of local reality.

3. Local Engagement and Realistic Constraints

The lesson here is profound. When people remain connected to their local communities, they acquire a grounded understanding of constraints. They learn the limits of success and failure, what can be accomplished with the resources available, and how tradeoffs work in practice. During World War II, the Blitz in London exemplified this dynamic. Citizens were immersed in immediate danger, working together to solve real problems. Air raid warnings, shelter logistics, and rationing created a shared understanding of reality. People didn’t expect utopia—they understood the stakes, calibrated their expectations, and acted collectively to maintain the system.

Contrast that with the digital super-tribes of today. When you are engaged primarily online, your community is largely abstract, and feedback loops are weakened. You may feel connected to people, ideas, and causes, but this connection does not confer an understanding of local constraints or the limits of practical action. This disconnection fosters utopian thinking: a belief that systems should function perfectly, that solutions should exist without cost, and that failures are avoidable rather than inevitable.

4. Crisis and the Limits of Disengagement

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 illustrates this perfectly. During the crisis, people were expected to comply with complex public health measures, but understanding of pandemics and appropriate responses was uneven. Leadership was inconsistent, sometimes incompetent, sometimes obfuscating. Many citizens had no foundation in epidemiology or public health policy. The result was a fractured response: blind compliance on the one hand, skepticism and conspiracy theories on the other. Without grounded engagement, the very mechanisms of trust and shared reality broke down. Super-tribes formed—some digital, some ideological—but none of them replaced the practical feedback loops and communal understanding that had supported society during a crisis like the Blitz.

What this shows is that engagement without grounding is ineffective and potentially destabilizing. People may be highly active in their global or online tribe, but if that activity is disconnected from local reality, it does not sustain the culture, the infrastructure, or the institutions that make survival and stability possible. Attempts to maintain utopian ideals without understanding limits can accelerate systemic strain rather than alleviate it.

5. Material Prosperity and Systemic Strain

Since the 1980s, Western societies have generally improved materially. Health, infrastructure, and wealth expanded, and systems were relatively stable. People could assume that their environment—the roads, hospitals, schools, and civic institutions—functioned as expected. But the current era is revealing a different story. Across Western countries, fiscal and structural pressures are growing. Hospitals back up, municipal systems degrade, and even cities in England face bankruptcy for the first time in generations. The combination of aging infrastructure, deferred maintenance, rising costs, and demographic shifts has created widespread strain.

Here is where McLuhan’s framework becomes illuminating. He foresaw that as attention moved from print-based, linear culture to electronic, oral-style culture, community and accountability would be reshaped. But he could not have foreseen the fragmentation of attention that global, digital super-tribes would produce. Now, cultural attention is often redirected toward distant or abstract causes, leaving local systems under-maintained. The gap between expectation and capacity widens, fueling the perception of crisis.

6. Culture Maintenance and Responsibility

This leads to a critical point: culture does not maintain itself. Even failed attempts to improve or stabilize it are better than disengagement. If citizens abandon their local responsibilities to invest in global or digital utopias, local culture, infrastructure, and systems will drift toward dysfunction. In other words, cultural maintenance requires participation. You cannot outsource it entirely to abstract communities or super-tribes.

Engagement is not only about physical labor or direct action; it also involves observing, understanding, and responding to tradeoffs. Awareness of limitations is crucial. If you are disconnected, you only operate in idealized mental models. You may imagine your utopia, but it exists outside the systems that produce your daily life: the roads, the water, the garbage systems, the hospitals. Without grounded engagement, reality drifts, and crises emerge not because people are lazy but because attention has migrated.

7. Lessons from McLuhan for the Digital Age

McLuhan gave us the framework: print shapes linear, individualistic thinking; electronic media returns us to oral, tribal cognition. He predicted re-tribalization, simultaneity, and the collapse of space and time in human interaction. Today, we see this realized in globally distributed super-tribes, rapid information cycles, and emotionally charged online communities. His insights about structural shifts in cognition were remarkably accurate.

What he could not foresee were the precise challenges we face:

The fragmentation of attention across multiple tribes
The decoupling of identity from geography
The resulting neglect of local systems
The emergence of misinformation and conspiracy narratives in crises

Yet the logic he proposed still holds: the shift to electronic or digital media changes the shape of human engagement, expectation, and responsibility. What we are living through now is the concrete outcome of his prediction, and it’s far more complex than he could map at the time.

8. A Framework for Understanding Our Time

We can summarize the transition as follows:

Print culture created stability, abstraction, and delegation of memory. Linear thought dominated, and local communities were implicitly reinforced by shared expectations and permanence.
Electronic culture returned us to oral-style cognition. People cluster in emotionally and cognitively connected units; speed and simultaneity dominate; feedback is social rather than structural.
Super-tribes form in the digital age. Identity is decoupled from geography, communities are global, and attention is fragmented. Participation is abundant but often misaligned with practical constraints.
Local engagement is crucial for grounded understanding. Those who maintain local systems create stability, enforce tradeoffs, and calibrate expectations. Disengagement from local realities fosters utopian thinking, frustration, and systemic strain.
Modern crises reveal the consequences. COVID-19, urban fiscal stress, infrastructure decline, and inequality illustrate what happens when attention migrates away from the systems that support daily life.
Participation—even if imperfect—stabilizes culture. The act of engagement, observation, and maintenance maintains norms, infrastructure, and shared understanding. Failure to participate leaves systems vulnerable to drift, collapse, or manipulation.

9. Conclusion

Looking at 2027 through McLuhan’s lens, we see a society in transition. His prediction—that electronic media would create a return to oral, tribal cognition—has been realized with uncanny accuracy. But the results are more complex, nuanced, and fragile than he could have imagined. The digital super-tribe provides connection, identity, and community on a scale never before possible. Yet this very structure undermines local engagement, realistic understanding, and system maintenance.

Our challenge, then, is to reconcile the global and the local: to harness the benefits of tribal engagement, speed, and connectivity while maintaining awareness and responsibility for the physical and structural realities that sustain life. McLuhan gave us the framework; the task now is to understand the consequences and act within them. To ignore them is to live in a utopia of our own imagination, untethered from the systems that make daily life possible.

Word count: 3,007

Sunday, 15 March 2026

Demographics, Fear, and Moral Spin

By Ed Scholz

People like to talk about numbers as if they tell the whole story. But the truth is, numbers only ever tell half. The other half is the story you tell about them. And right now, in the West, we’re seeing numbers shift. Populations are changing. Whites are becoming a smaller percentage of the population. Immigrants, refugees, and newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are coming in waves, reshaping towns, neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.

There’s a story about this shift that some people whisper in dark corners online, a story they call the Great Replacement. They frame it like a secret plan, a cabal conspiring to erase a people. It’s fear dressed up as theory. Conspiracy sells. But the numbers themselves? They’re just numbers. And the shift isn’t secret; it’s slow, steady, and visible.

On the other side, there’s a different story, told by academics, journalists, and policymakers. They call it diversity, multiculturalism, inclusion, open borders. They frame the same shift as a good thing, a moral victory, a correction of historical wrongs. They celebrate it. Refugees are welcomed. Immigration is framed as enrichment. The thesis is identical—populations are shifting—but the story is flipped. One side screams threat; the other sings virtue.

And here’s where it gets tricky. Moral stories don’t build schools, hospitals, or housing. They don’t teach English, or make room for social integration, or pay the bills that come with sudden population growth. Look at Canada’s Syrian refugees under Justin Trudeau. The country responded with energy, goodwill, and political momentum. Hotels became temporary homes. Communities pitched in. Costs skyrocketed. Yet the housing infrastructure was never fully prepared. Schools lacked proper ESL programs; hospitals faced increased strain. The effort was heroic, compassionate, even historic—but the planning lagged behind the moral imperative. In short, the lifeboat was overloaded, rocking under weight, and everyone—newcomers and longtime residents alike—felt the strain.

The challenge isn’t just social—it’s economic. Immigrants arrive with skills, some high, some low, and governments often prioritize immediate labor needs over long-term planning. You bring in workers, and suddenly hospitals, schools, roads, and housing are strained. ESL programs lag. Special infrastructure—schools for children who don’t speak the language, vocational training for adults—is underdeveloped. Without this, short-term labor gains can turn into long-term systemic stress.

Even more than logistics, there’s a cultural reality the moral story often ignores. The left assumes everyone shares Western values: liberty, tolerance, gender equality, freedom of speech, rule of law. That assumption is false. Many newcomers come from countries with authoritarian traditions, rigid social hierarchies, or religious norms incompatible with liberal Western societies. Some hold beliefs that conflict sharply with Canadian or European norms—attitudes toward homosexuality, women’s rights, or civic life.

Some newcomers bring deep-seated religious or cultural beliefs that clash with liberal norms. In certain communities, homosexuality is taught as a sin punishable by death; LGBTQ+ people are regarded as part of an “agenda” to corrupt society. Children are raised with fear of what Western liberal societies take for granted: free expression, equal rights, and the protection of personal choice. These beliefs do not vanish upon arrival. Over time, social pressure and integration programs may shift attitudes, but for many, the first generation maintains habits, worldviews, and social norms deeply embedded in a different historical and moral framework.

Even well-meaning immigrants often carry institutional habits from their homelands. Bribery, nepotism, and informal favoritism are normalized in many states. A newcomer may ask, almost instinctively, “Who do we pay to get things done?” even while disapproving of corruption. They may obey Canadian law, but social intuition—how to navigate authority, business, and local power structures—can clash with Western expectations. When many newcomers arrive simultaneously, these habits, multiplied, can create subtle systemic frictions. Labor markets function, but trust, efficiency, and civic cohesion are stressed.

The pattern repeats across history. Columbus was a hero once, a monster later. European settlers were civilization builders once, conquerors later. Immigrants today are celebrated for diversity—but only because the story has been written that way. Human beings always overlay moral narratives on neutral phenomena. Fear and virtue are the twin narrators, and history swings between them.

The key insight is simple: Great Replacement and progressive “open borders” policies describe the same underlying phenomenon. The difference is not numbers—it is spin. One fears it, one celebrates it. One tells you to hide under the bed; the other tells you to clap. But reality does not care about spin. Numbers, labor, population density, cultural integration, housing, schools, hospitals, economic pressures—these are what truly matter. Policies must be grounded in economic and social realities, not solely in moral narratives.

We live in the mirror of our own stories. Moral frameworks guide rhetoric and policy, but without practical, integrated planning, society risks tipping the lifeboat: good intentions cannot substitute for proper schools, hospitals, infrastructure, or economic structures. Values and labor, culture and money, narrative and numbers—they are inseparable. If one neglects the tangible, the moral high ground collapses under its own weight.

And the final irony is perhaps the most telling. The moral story assumes everyone is compatible with liberal Western values. Reality is different. Without cultural alignment, some of the newcomers may resist, consciously or unconsciously, the norms that made these countries prosperous and free. Economic integration alone cannot solve that. Cultural and civic education, long-term planning, and infrastructure investment are not moral gestures—they are the scaffolding on which moral ideals and economic potential alike depend.

History will judge whether the story we tell ourselves matches the reality we can sustain. Fear and virtue, numbers and narrative, morality and pragmatism—they must all be accounted for, or the lifeboat tips. And when it does, the wake is felt by everyone, not just those newly arrived or those long established.

Saturday, 14 March 2026

She stood at the edge of the asphalt, hips thrust forward in a deliberate, arched sway that caught the late afternoon sun just so, casting subtle shadows along the curve of her back. One leg was angled slightly forward, the other braced behind, feet planted firmly but casually, giving her stance both balance and an effortless invitation. Her arm extended out toward the road, elbow bent, wrist relaxed, thumb jutting confidently skyward—the universal sign of waiting, of signaling, of daring a world of passing strangers to notice.

The movement wasn’t rigid or mechanical; it had the unstudied fluidity of someone who had practiced it in mirrors and memory, who knew how a tilt of the head, the gentle curve of the spine, and the light in the eyes could communicate more than words ever could. Her fingers twitched faintly, the gesture alive, alive with intention yet seeming accidental, as though the world might just pause for a second, glance, and drive on, missing nothing.

Sunlight played across the planes of her body, highlighting the subtle tension in her calves, the sweep of her skirt, the gleam along her wrist. Her gaze followed the road, catching each approaching car with a spark of curiosity and mischief, a tiny smile hovering just at the corners of her lips. In that instant, she was both a figure of playful audacity and cinematic symmetry—a living emblem of roadside allure, frozen in the eternal frame between motion and expectation.

Friday the 13th BAD LUCK DAY

Friday the 13th Scholz and Zeno and Wallace

Friday the 13th, that date whose superstitious reputation is both absurd and compulsively compelling (or so I tell myself as I watch a snowstorm, small and unheroic but sufficient to make every pedestrian regret having emerged), began, as is typical, with the residue of a fractured sleep—the kind where the mind doesn’t quite leave the dream, doesn’t quite register the morning, and yet somehow is simultaneously alert to every minor failing of the world outside. The air was colder than yesterday, which was mild, reminding me that temperature can itself be a petty adversary, and the snow—enough to inconvenience but not enough to glorify—settled over the city like a layer of passive-aggressive criticism.

I left the house around ten, intending to attend a medical appointment, which, like minor wars or particularly tedious court cases, is best approached with low expectations, and I was not disappointed: the elevator, a machine whose existence I had assumed as fundamental to civilized life, was broken. This is always interesting: the moment a system fails, civilization itself seems to wink out; the abstraction of progress vanishes in favor of the immediate, irritating friction of stairs and awkward eye contact with strangers who, like you, are considering whether to complain or to keep quiet. A stranger helped me descend—small kindness, and yet also a reminder that misfortune often comes laced with minor, accidental grace.

Later I learned there was a working elevator elsewhere in the building, invisible because of absent signage—a fact that might serve as a metaphor for institutions more broadly, or might simply annoy the reader; the solution exists, but never where you are told to look, and often not where you expect.

Then I discovered, in what was arguably my own most egregious error of the day, that my transport was booked for eleven p.m., not a.m.—a difference of twelve hours, which in practical terms can feel like twelve years if one has a fragile sense of temporal coordination. This I learned only after a period of waiting, during which I borrowed a telephone from a woman seated beside a young man in a wheelchair (and one notes the subtle social hierarchies in waiting rooms: who is allowed to occupy space, who offers space, who tolerates intrusion). The young man, a lawyer, spoke matter-of-factly of having suffered a stroke brought on by overwork. The story was delivered with the flatness of an ordinary weather report, yet it contained its own quiet tragedy: ambition exerted like physical force, until the body, overstrained, breaks. One could imagine the late nights, the towering stacks of papers, the adrenaline, and the eventual snap. I offered my card; transport was rearranged (12:30, weather-adjusted to 12:40), just barely avoiding the catastrophe of a misapplied fare.

And so the day progressed as a concatenation of small disasters and minor mercies—the broken elevator, the snow, the booking mistake, mitigated by borrowed devices, polite strangers, and fortuitous timing—forming, if one wanted to be generous, the kind of luck people only mention after misfortune: the wrist rather than the back, the inconvenience rather than catastrophe.

Late at night, Richard had returned my call. He sounded spent. His mother had recently fallen and lain on the floor for hours before being discovered—a tragic and horrifyingly ordinary human misfortune. He warmed to my suggestion of a Life Alert device, an action simultaneously practical and morally resonant. Richard and I, never quite allied, exist in a peculiar mutual recognition (which is itself an interesting phenomenon: the battlefield of chums rarely resolves neatly). There is a sense in which decency can act independently of affection, a stubbornness of morality that insists on small gestures despite larger relational indifference.

Looking back, the day’s misfortunes seemed modest. Yet threaded through them were the faint but undeniable evidence of human care: the arm on the staircase, the borrowed telephone, the conversation with a broken-yet-dignified young lawyer, Richard’s concern. Friday the 13th, then, was neither unlucky nor particularly remarkable—merely human, and human in the way that makes small accidents and small kindnesses inseparable from one another. And in that, perhaps, lies a kind of insight that is as subtle as it is necessary.

Wednesday, 11 March 2026

Michelin Dispatch from an Imaginary Island

A Financial Inspection of Hawthorn, the Restaurant That Ate Its Guests

Somewhere beyond the polite coastline—where the ferry engines cough brine into the air and the mainland dissolves into a blue abstraction—there stands a restaurant that, according to cinema, eventually burns its diners alive.

This restaurant, Hawthorn, presided over by the tyrannical genius Chef Julian Slowik in The Menu, was written as satire, as horror, as culinary theology turned blood ritual.

But suppose for a moment we perform a small act of intellectual heresy.

Suppose we treat Hawthorn not as fiction but as a Michelin candidate.

Suppose the inspectors arrive quietly on the same boat as the paying guests—clipboard concealed beneath the linen napkin—and ask the dullest question imaginable:

Does this place actually make money?

For if there is one thing the world of gastronomy has mastered, it is the conversion of staggering theatrical spectacle into rather modest financial outcomes.

The Twelve Apostles of Gastronomy

The premise of Hawthorn is simple enough to fit on a receipt.

Twelve guests arrive.

They pay approximately $1,000 each for the privilege of witnessing a multi-course ritual conducted with the solemnity of a minor papal conclave.

Revenue for the evening:

$12,000.

That number sounds enormous until one remembers that restaurants are less businesses than furnaces into which money is ceremonially fed.

Observe the Hawthorn brigade.

The dining room staff move like ballet dancers trained by the KGB.
The kitchen contains an entire platoon of cooks.
There are sommeliers, dishwashers, porters, boat crew, and island maintenance workers.

The film presents roughly twenty staff members.

Let us be generous and assume that perhaps twelve are actually working the dinner service.

Pay them decently—because chefs of this temperament do not tolerate amateurs—and the payroll alone begins to resemble a modest wedding reception.

Allow roughly $4,800 per night for labor.

Already the sacred $12,000 begins to shrink.

The Price of Edible Sculpture

Now consider the food.

Hawthorn is not serving hamburgers and fries.

Each plate arrives like a doctoral thesis in edible philosophy: sea foam, smoked leaves, perhaps a single scallop contemplating its existence under a microscope of beurre blanc.

Luxury tasting menus often carry wholesale ingredient costs between $100 and $200 per guest.

Multiply by twelve diners and we are somewhere around $2,000 in raw materials.

The menu, like modern art, may appear minimal.

But minimalism is frequently extremely expensive.

Add wine pairings—Burgundy that costs more per bottle than a used car—and the financial structure becomes even more delicate.

The Island Problem

Then there is the small inconvenience of geography.

Hawthorn sits on an island.

Islands are picturesque, romantic, and catastrophically expensive.

Fuel for the boat.
Maintenance for the dock.
Insurance for the building perched heroically above the sea.
Repairs to kitchen equipment that inevitably decides to die during service.

Spread those costs across the year and you are looking at perhaps $3,000 per night in operational overhead.

Which leaves our heroic culinary empire with the following balance sheet:

Revenue: $12,000

Labor: $4,800
Food: $2,000
Operations: $3,000

Profit:

About $2,000.

Two thousand dollars.

Roughly the price of the wine list.

The Annual Revelation

Let us continue the autopsy.

Restaurants of this complexity cannot operate every night.

Even tyrants require prep days.

Assume the restaurant runs three to five nights per week.

Assume forty-eight working weeks per year.

Assume ten percent cancellations for weather, mechanical failures, or the occasional existential meltdown from the chef.

The resulting annual profit lands somewhere between:

$260,000 and $432,000.

Not bad.

But also not the sort of figure one expects from a temple of culinary absolutism.

Especially when one remembers the additional burdens:

loan payments on the building
replacement of equipment
catastrophic repairs to boats
taxes

After those expenses, the owner of Hawthorn might earn less than a successful orthodontist.

Which raises an awkward philosophical question.

Why does anyone do this?

The Cult of Culinary Prestige

The answer lies in a peculiar phenomenon known in the restaurant world as prestige economics.

In this system the dinner itself is not the main product.

The dinner is merely the ritual sacrifice that generates myth.

Consider Noma, created by the relentlessly inventive René Redzepi.

Noma became the most celebrated restaurant on Earth while serving relatively few diners each evening.

Its menu involved fermented berries, moss, ants, and other items that appear to have been discovered during a Viking expedition gone slightly off course.

The restaurant was revolutionary.

It was also financially delicate.

Yet Noma produced something far more valuable than nightly profits.

It produced global legend.

The Laboratory Model

The same phenomenon occurred at El Bulli, the culinary research laboratory operated by Ferran Adrià.

El Bulli served roughly fifty guests per night and closed for months each year while the staff experimented with foams, spheres, and other substances that appeared to belong more properly in a chemistry department.

Financially, the restaurant barely broke even.

Culturally, it detonated like a supernova.

Adrià became the Picasso of cuisine.

Books followed.

Lectures followed.

Consulting contracts followed.

The restaurant itself became a temple whose true income came from pilgrims.

The Power of Scarcity

Hawthorn, were it real, would operate under the same principle.

Twelve seats.

Reservations impossible to obtain.

A chef rumored to be either a genius or a sociopath.

Scarcity creates desire.

Desire creates myth.

Myth creates money—just not always inside the dining room.

Cookbooks appear.

Streaming documentaries emerge.

Luxury hotel chains beg for collaborations.

Suddenly the chef who once sweated over scallops on an island finds himself advising billionaires on the philosophical meaning of pickled seaweed.

The Psychology of the Guests

The film’s brilliance lies in its portrayal of the diners.

They are not hungry.

They are devout.

The tech investors treat the meal like a status acquisition.

The food critic behaves like a high priestess of gastronomy.

The obsessive foodie recites culinary trivia the way medieval scholars recited scripture.

Everyone present believes they are witnessing something profound.

Which they are.

Just perhaps not in the way they imagine.

The Tyranny of Perfection

Where the satire cuts deepest is in its depiction of the kitchen.

The brigade moves with terrifying discipline.

Every plate arrives with the precision of a military maneuver.

No improvisation.

No joy.

Only perfection.

This exaggerates, but does not entirely misrepresent, the culture of certain elite kitchens.

Culinary greatness often requires a level of obsession that borders on pathology.

Long hours.

Absolute hierarchy.

A relentless demand for flawlessness.

Hawthorn simply carries this logic to its homicidal conclusion.

The Michelin Verdict

If inspectors were forced to issue a verdict on Hawthorn, they might write something along these lines:

The restaurant presents a technically brilliant tasting menu executed with extraordinary discipline. The setting is unique and enhances the narrative of the meal. However, the establishment’s financial model appears fragile and dependent on external revenue streams generated by the chef’s reputation.

Translated into plain language:

The food is extraordinary.
The economics are absurd.

The Real Secret

This brings us to the strangest truth of modern luxury dining.

The world’s most famous restaurants are often not optimized for profit.

They are optimized for legend.

A small dining room creates intimacy.

Intimacy creates mystique.

Mystique travels the globe faster than any marketing campaign.

The result is a peculiar form of alchemy.

A $12,000 dinner service becomes a $10 million brand.

The Ashes of Hawthorn

In the final act of The Menu, Hawthorn collapses into flames, its guests transformed into a grotesque culinary metaphor involving marshmallows and chocolate.

It is a moment of operatic absurdity.

But one suspects that, had the inspectors arrived a week earlier—before the conflagration—they might have left with a quieter observation.

Something like this:

The meal was extraordinary.
The chef was terrifying.
The wine pairings were impeccable.

And despite the spectacle, the ledger suggested a truth that would make any banker sigh with recognition:

Even the most exclusive restaurant in the world is still, in the end, a small business with a very expensive stove.

Early May 2012, Toronto, outside the theater at Hot Docs, my friend Shelly and I were handed a wholly unexpected assignment: escort and protect Rick Springfield, the 1980s rock luminary, singer of “Jessie’s Girl”, TV actor on General Hospital, and subject of the documentary An Affair of the Heart, chronicling both his decades-spanning music career and the obsessively loyal fans who had kept him alive in their hearts long after the charts moved on.

I had to admit, I didn’t really know him—his songs had drifted through my consciousness like faint echoes of a long-forgotten pop landscape. To me, he was an iconic figure, distant and almost abstract. Shelly, however, was a walking archive of pop music lore, and her excitement radiated in visible waves, a mixture of awe, adoration, and the deep, personal recognition of a musician who had shaped her musical imagination. She was beside him all day, moving through the festival orbiting his presence like a satellite, absorbing every word, every gesture.

The limo slid to a halt, and immediately the mob erupted—an undulating organism of devotion and frenzy, limbs and cameras reaching, voices slicing the air with shrieks and laughter, bodies pressing like the tide against a levee. The wave of excitement was almost tactile, vibrating underfoot, radiating through the shoulders of every person caught in the surge. One woman’s scream pierced the chaos, a clarion call of ecstatic delirium that rippled through the press of bodies. I had been told I would walk him inside, but the corporeal torrent dictated otherwise: my body became a human bulwark, a living barricade, coiled and braced against the eager onslaught, backing him toward the theater doors. Every muscle was taut, every step a negotiation with momentum and human desire, a constant adjustment to keep him upright, moving, untouched by the press of dozens maybe hundreds of fans who meant no harm but had no concept of boundaries.

Rick Springfield, composed in the epicenter of this convulsive adulation, smiled, nodded, and absorbed the veneration without succumbing to it. with the expcetion of a very brisk walk almost a jog. Love or fear of his fans kept him energized Each glance, each slight nod, acted as a pacifier, a human signal that everything was under control, even as the mob lunged forward, cameras flashing, phones thrust in his face. Step by inch, we navigated the swarm, the rhythm dictated by the unpredictable pushes and pulls, the tide of hands, arms, and shoulders. I could feel the olfactory mosaic of sweat, perfume, and gasoline from engines lingering in the street air, a fragrant testimony to collective devotion. The bodies pressed closer, a kinetic testament to memory and desire, to the decades of music and television that had lodged themselves in the hearts of strangers.

I shifted my stance, anticipating the next surge, pivoting slightly to absorb a shove from the right, then the left, the crowd folding into itself, bodies bending, twisting, eager fingers brushing the edges of our protective wall. It was chaos tempered by precision; chaos mediated by instinct. The fans were ecstatic, almost ecstatic to the point of disorientation, yet entirely harmless if controlled—but a single misstep could topple that delicate balance. Every inch was earned. Every breath was a negotiation. Every heartbeat synced to the rhythm of the press around us.

Then—the threshold. The doors gaped, a narrow, sanctified gateway into calm. I steered him toward it, feeling the final surge of the crowd ricochet against the frame, bodies pressing with joyous insistence, the air thrumming with adrenaline and adoration. My hands and arms pressed, forcing the portal to hold against the surge, a fragile equilibrium between chaos and order. Rick crossed it, stepping into the sanctuary, leaving the storm behind. Shelly vanished beside him, entwined in the documentary’s orbit, radiant with excitement, living every second of it. Outside, I remained, the living barricade, pressing, pushing, absorbing the ecstatic maelstrom, my body and attention stretched to its limit, each second vibrating with imminent peril and rapturous devotion.

In that infinitesimal span, I touched the raw architecture of fame: volatile, vivid, tangible in the press of bodies, the heat, the screams, the flashes of cameras. It was not abstract, not mediated, but alive, immediate, and almost dangerously beautiful. I felt the strange exhilaration of being both protector and participant, part of the machinery that allowed a star to pass through human desire unscathed. Those five minutes—brief, intense, impossibly dense—etched themselves into memory, indelible, a collision of chaos, energy, and human devotion that could never be fully replicated or forgotten.