Although it’s only 9 a.m. in Long Beach, Nassim Guammaz appears to be well rested when he looks into the camera of his phone. His hair and beard that he has grown might give him a disheveled look, but his mind is already focused. He’s been in California for three weeks now – first in San Francisco and now here – in order to finish filming for his part in the upcoming Element video. But somehow, we quickly abandoned talking about that because Nassim has a lot of other interesting things to say right now.

Las Vegas is made of empty spaces – parking lots, drainage ditches, the desert that it squats in. The most famous empty space on earth is the Grand Canyon and you can see it on this page. The most urgent empty space opens between ears when you spend two weeks in a van with your close friends losing money and sanity to the desert winds. A bet was lost and won on this trip.

The skulls of animals shot in the forests around Bratislava line the wall behind Marek’s head. His mum brings deer, duck, dumplings, and sauerkraut to the table outside, as well as juice made from stinging nettles and fruit. She continues to put food on the table until there is no space left. After we plow through the delicious main course, it’s time for poppy-seed cakes and coffee.

The setting: an apartment in West Hollywood that Jason Dill is moving out of right now. The acting personas: Dill himself with a long monolog. The plot: read for yourself.

It’s 10:30 a.m. on a beautiful spring day as Sammy and I pull up to Buena Park. If you’ve never been, it’s a classic city block public park with a fenced-off concrete skatepark in the middle. The skatepark’s empty naturally, it’s still early, and besides the chirping of birds and the odd car passing by, there’s a calmness and serenity to what looks like a sleepy suburban block.