Over the past few years, I have found myself increasingly distracted by a series of hypnosis-based art projects conceived together with my friend Raimundas Malasauskas. When he last visited me in Los Angeles recently, I had planned an itinerary designed to allow him to zoom in on what he calls the city’s “unparalleled knot of incompatible realities and regimes of truth.”

Cut to: Universal Studios, lot entrance.