Mindless Pleasures (2021, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, 156 pp. softcover) examines Los Angeles artist Scott Benzel’s multifaceted project from its origins in a Spring 2019 course at California Institute of the Arts to a Fall 2020 exhibition and subsequent “addendum” works and texts. Mindless Pleasures (named for the abandoned working title of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow) is Benzel’s examination of the forces of leisure, chaos, and compulsion from the mid-20th Century to the present.