Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

North Face

22 min read

North Face

Article

North Face is a recurring brand in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 15, 2025 and February 25, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I took a North Face backpack all about town”; “I packed up my north face back-pack”. It most often appears alongside Night Club 101, Prada, Upper West Side.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 15, 2025
  • Last seen: February 25, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Summer Break
July 15, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, July 7 On the upper west side there are big french windows. green branches outside and you can’t see the street. There is a gray townhouse across the way, marble framing, air conditioning in the attic. I have crashed here before. I have been to the central park zoo. I have whispered on the whisper bench. I took cigarettes from the apartment before I left. I moved to Berlin once. I came back and I came here. I got a job at a gallery. I was given a life the next winter. There was a life before. I am not vindictive at all. I am waiting for a collapse that has not come. 12.23.24 - Today; a crisp clear morning of ice and snow and dreamy clarity at home. I haven't felt this at peace in the country in so long, I haven't felt able to access this place in forever. Now, something shifts. 12.28.24 - The idea being of course, that once you realize the shortness of the time you have, you become paralyzed of wasting it. 1.17.25 - After I floated through the kitchen for a while I remarked, oh this is a lazy morning. You consider jumping around with your soulmate all day lazy?, I was asked. 1.21.25 - I screamed my lifemylifemylifemylife too and then I put a towel in my mouth in the bathroom and I bit down hard. 1.26.25 - we talk about values — which we mostly share I went to Fanelli Cafe The Roxy Hotel and The Party and then who knows. I took a North Face backpack all about town. I took a Prada purse. I took a call. I took a meeting. I took beet juice at lunch. I took water with dinner. I forgot how to write. Artificial Intelligence remembered how to tell me about psychosis. Artificial Intelligence remembered how to affirm. I remembered my humility. I remembered how to recite advice. It is not that things are good. Where is my spiral? I have been checking my notes. If all adds up, then there should have been some spiral. It’s spiraling all around me. I wrote a letter. I didn’t tell everyone. There is nothing really left to write. The end was not so much the artistic sort of thing. I am still still still. I have heard the news. I have heard the latest. Split screen. Split personality. I used to write it like performance art. It is insane, at a certain point, to insist it is performance art. Queen of the Fairies, the signs say in Bushwick. They're talking on the phone on the street and so they seem schizophrenic, my dad says in Bushwick. Schizophrenic is not always as it seems, I am smirking in Bushwick. No one is laughing. Everyone is graceful. I keep on ruining the vibe. I was told once that I thought that I was something like Mother Theresa. You write like this and so you ruin what is sacred. Some things are sacred. Artificial Intelligence cut me off. Artificial Intelligence caught a whiff of my vibe. Tuesday, July 8 There is a fire by the ocean and gray gray gray dusk and I had wine against my own best interest. I thought I would say, here is what I recall. I recall nothing. There is so much I could distinguish from the wreck of it all. I'm ok but you are not so in this world today, Iris is saying on the beach. I recall we went to The Folly. I closed the door in the bathroom up the stairs. I ate Chicken and Rice, Joe's Pizza, Springbone Kitchen, Two Martinis. Throw the butter from the fridge in the trash because it really smells like rot. I was not always convinced that everything was about to rot, but I was always pretty sure about the butter. It all becomes a bit trite in writing. Not in recollection. I wish I could recall so much of anything at all. What are your favorite furniture items in memory, my dad asks Iris after the beach. Iris says a yellow ottoman. My dad lights a fire. My dad is on StreetEasy. I'm on that artificial intelligence wave in a big way. You can tell I've developed the habit because I sound abruptly so much stupider. You can tell I have little ground to stand on because, absence, no memory, relinquish nostalgia and I have nothing to say. I liked the little wooden chairs by the fire in Massachusetts. I like my map of Buzzards Bay. I liked the wooden table at a house surrounded by all that green. I did first like the Bacchus mask in New York, though I am learning to be cautious with symbolism and the thing of what you may conjure. My dad liked the bed he built into his cabin. There are people who build cabins. There are people whose whims don't dictate their attacks. There are people who are just one person all at once. The dog chased the coyote up the beach and I chased the crab apple path up towards the house and there is a paisley blanket and an oil painting of a woman in a long pleat white dress and a black hat with a black bow and a small child with his hand clutched in hers. Wednesday, July 9 Lying on the speckled blue sheets under a canopy of white veil thinking about how I’m going to get the fuck back to the city. Thinking about where I am going to live. I am going to need to pull a lot of favors. I will not be listless. Wander around my all new neighborhood in a daze of self abandon. Abandon limbo. It will be interesting to see what happens when I abandon limbo. I suspect that it'll be nothing good. Were you so addicted to the chaos? Iris asks me. Will you need to manufacture new situations to respond to? It’s just that, reckless abandon doesn't really bother me, I say. It’s not so much that this is necessarily what I crave. There is a music box and I am noticing my initials on the inside. There are mussels in coconut milk and bluefish on the porch and I was quiet quiet quiet today, though I get the sense that suddenly all around me, it is beginning to happen fast fast fast. Thursday, July 10 I stopped with all the quiet and then I regretted it in an instant. There are gray walls like paper maché and a white wooden canopy bed frame and a toy boat all tan and teal green propped up on the bookshelf. You have been lying in every bed in the house, Iris said. Rotate them like musical chairs. I was not so sure where I should land. I was lying on a yellow bedspread, then. Dusk, then. The curtains were drawn but they were light and sheer and easy to imagine what was just on the other side. Friday, July 11 New York is pulsing pulsing pulsing summer and I am glad to be back even just, to do little with it. Dinner at Lure Fishbar which is lovely and a clarity summit on the terrace which is less rotten in its final days, smog over the railing and the lights are blinking on and off in dusk haze across the river and then, everyone leaves. I leave too. Bring drinks in plastic bottles to the bar. Starting my days earlier and ending them later. There will be other things. I could handwrite it next time. I could use lugger.com or the nice neighbor from May or the generosity from others that I worry I do not return or deserve to move the couch. So, nothing ever happens. Stay up until seven in the morning and then it's taking down the fir wreaths because those are becoming a fire hazard too. Taking down the buoy and the copper pot because those are coming with me. The terrace has become all clogged with cigarettes and I notice it only now, plastic tarnished wood and the cracks are all stuffed with tar and rainwater and dead branches. So, I could do yard work I suppose. Or, I could just leave. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, July 15 From 8pm - 12pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — a one night only reading of an AI generated play trained on all Matthew Gasda’s plays. Error 404: Play Not Found. Tickets are free but donations are encouraged. - “This will be done with ample drinking and unseriousness--but the experiment may also be interesting on a philosophical level.”
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-s02!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa0eebadf-a2d7-4370-aa2c-ff5b1e6112ba_756x424.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5VsE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa28d040d-b3a0-4770-82bd-6e231622df77_632x410.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UYwU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46ea23c2-0020-4017-9cf8-fb844593afb0_1536x2048.jpeg, The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Error 404: Play Not Found
Life-in-a-lab
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Tuesday Life-in-a-lab In my dream, the house was a lab. I woke up to light not just streaming no, but flooding, absolutely pouring through the long glass windows in front of me. I knew that once the light cleared, I would be staring into the heart of this lab. I knew it was a problem that I was anticipating waking up in a lab, because I knew that I should have been anticipating a morning waking up at home. Instead, I was finding myself totally nonplused about waking up in a lab. The important thing, I knew, as I woke up with a sense of increasing urgency, was to conjure up an image of a home, not a lab. You have been in a lab for so long that you have forgotten about home, a very confident voice inside my head was saying. A picture of my childhood bedroom appeared in a few frames. Different versions. Big white bed and blue wooden floors and presently frosty fields behind the house. Little twin bed yellow walls, carpeted floors, and hot summer cornfields outside. I couldn’t get it straight. If I was in a lab, then I needed to remember. You need to remember a place that actually exists, the lab-attendants were saying in my dream. Saying in my head. Glass apartment in the sky. Room at The Marlton Hotel. I’ve been eating vegetables and collecting things like dried flowers and books on Esoteric Health and buying wash-and-fold laundry service and being swept away to places like nice restaurants with no menus and nice-apartments-with-no-owners. I woke up in Connecticut. Can’t wake up in a lab if you never go to sleep. In the morning, I woke up at close to noon. I shared photos on The Internet of a very aesthetically-cohesive and un-lab-like home. I went to the bathroom to wash my face and collect myself as best I could. The house was beautiful, and I was unsure as to why I was watching things unfold from as if I was somewhere else. I made lists of things that were special, being places like this most of all. I made lists of things that compose self respect, and then I made lists of things that compose a life that is bright and white and full of light. The country is quiet and sometimes difficult for me, though I sleep through the night now and this changes everything. Downstairs, the dogs and Celia and the other were sitting under high lofted ceilings. There was a magical and silvery presence that mediation gives to a person. I asked about coffee and they told me there was coffee in the pot and I could heat it up in a silver bowl on the stove. The stove was green and handmade and you turned it on by flicking little metal burner switches. The bowl was nice and very small. I poured the coffee in the bowl and I waited for everything to begin to boil. I added vital proteins collagen and also oat milk creamer and also lots of white sugar because the esoteric health advice of the age says this is fine. There were homemade mini muffins from The Smith Bakery down the street on the counter (blueberry, morning harvest, strawberry corn, and chocolate chip) and so I cut each muffin in half, and then I had one-half-of-each. Two mini muffins total. I put two of the halves in the toaster, and I had two of the halves cold. Everyone started telling me about gnosticism and buddhism and catholicism. They recommended to me a friend who writes about God and married into a famous band. They recommended I come to meditate in places like New York, too. You look ready, Celia said, as I packed up my north face back-pack and changed out of split-sweatpants and banaa-republic-black-top. I’m not, I snapped, in response. Do you actually want to meditate more, Celia asked. I don’t say I want to do things I don’t actually want to do, I replied. I could not stop with all this harshness. Wednesday Grand Central Station Back in New York City and I am totally covered in dog hair. Shoes untied in Grand Central Station but there is nowhere for me to stop and tie them without risking some sort of stampede or at least massive inconvenience and so onward we go. A man just walked towards me rapidly and I flinched and then felt kind of bad. Then, he shouted; young lady can I ask you a question and so now I do not feel bad. My instincts were correct, and now I do not feel bad at all. Ok, fine, whatever. I used to love arriving back in New York and hearing all the music and the lights and I would twirl through this place nonpulsed. Then, I would twirl home. I used to get drunk-before-christmas at the midtown Cipriani and then giggle when people called my ex-boyfriend and I bad-people-for-cutting on the trains toward Albany, but I’m not allowed to move like that anymore. I used to sink into sixty-dollar taxi-cabs because I found the subway over-stimulating. My Prada purse used to be lined with shiny leather, but I got fidgety somewhere tropical and I ripped it all off so now we’re working with something more flattened and matte. Teenage girls used to fling themselves at the side of the train platforms, and conductors used to lose their whole crew in Boston and train heists used to happen. I used to consider everything to be pretty taken-care-of. I think I never used to notice when sometimes, problems would arise. On the train ride back to New York, tonight, the tracks were icy and slick and it was already kind of blue hour dusk. When I said goodbye, I told Celia I love you I love you I love you a million times over because I felt slightly neurotic about a weekend full of being slightly late and slightly harsh. I am smart enough to know that the only thing complaining makes you better at is complaining, so I decided to stop. In Grand Central Station, they are playing live music, and I watch a man propose, though no one else around the soon-to-be newlyweds reacted. No photos or energy. Sad. I am wearing beat up Ganni knee high boots and Brandy Melville long sleeved dress, and Zara blazer that I stole from Paul’s Baby Grande back when I was in the practice of going lots of places and stealing lots of things. I miss my Max Mara coat that I left at “tech week” and I miss “drinking” and I am suddenly desperate to be out the door. I imagine that when the subway doors fly open and I burst out free and all-in-one piece, I will see the Washington Square Park arch, and it will be glowing silver in mid-winter light. I imagine that the city will feel warm with soon-to-be-spring-humidity. I imagine that since groundhog day has come and gone the tides will change soon, and I imagine I will relinquish my Groundhog Day (1993) fantasies of nothing-ever-happens at some point down the line, when it all becomes a bit too much to take. Tomorrow, I will be taking my shoes to the tailor and then the next day, I will have a totally fresh new crop of things to wear. I imagine that soon, I will have a fresh new crop of things to consider. Thursday Whore Dialectics Greenwich Village’s bitcoin bar sports a libertarian clientele and taxidermy and a podcast studio and beef-tallow-fries. Tonight, it sports a projector screen from my old apartment that looks sad and small propped on stage, and a big audience in metal chairs, and a birthday party in the front room, and plenty of opportunities to make myself feel useful as I tinker with film equipment and fire off texts regarding “promotional material.” I am sitting at Pubkey Bar drinking a diet coke while I wait for the screening of “Whore Dialects” to begin. When I ordered my diet coke at the bar, a strange man made a strange joke about NA beer, and I felt immediately irritated and restrained by my self imposed limits. I am listening to a group of young men discuss the career path of “Internet Pervert” as one of the only viable post-AI jobs. Monetize your self destruction, they are saying. Male prostitution. Buying plushies is to women as buying porn is to men. There’s a strange pseudo-intellectual glare to it all and I am enjoying listening in. They are talking about Brian Kaplan, but they keep on mispronouncing his name. They are talking about scientists, rationalists, and flexible proposals. When they talk about Internet Perverts, there are stars in their eyes, less because of the sex, it seems, and more because the internet perverts are able to get some money and get some attention. The male influencer. That seems to be what they are starry eyed about. They are thrilled to be in the same extended universe as someone who might be able to garner some vague attention. This is a bar that usually makes me feel kind of hazy. This is a bar where I used to make scenes. Enough reminiscing, because I am here to watch a film that is all about auto-documentarians, which is in sharp contrast to the maladjusted forms of auto-diary or auto-fiction. In the film, a beautiful girl is in the back of a car with the wind in her face and she is drinking an Erewhon smoothie and talking about how Hollywood is dead and the monasteries are empty and you can’t be a nun or get a phd because you question what truth is, and these institutions just won’t let you get at it. After that, the film cuts to a scene where the girl is in a white dress being play-drowned in the ocean by a right-wing provocateur. The film crew sent the provocateur to stay with the girl, and it was kind of the perfect setup, a voiceover explains. The provocateur describes how when he arrived, the girl was in a state of almost total abjection. Like how kids who are sexually assaulted don’t shower to make themselves totally disgusting and unappealing, he explains. I find the provocateur slightly less interesting as a character than both the girl, and the disgraced art-advisor (another prominent character in the film) but I like when he argues about politics and then reconciles on a personal level with those around him in places like California. I like the scenes about the professionally fraught yet personally friendly relationship between the art advisor and his not terribly successful clients, ie the clients are disappointed but still use the advisor’s pool for summer swims. The client still dreams of having an eighteen person studio because this means tremendous success, and because this is just how men dream. When the provocateur is described but not depicted as losing control, it is explained that the jig is kind of up, because it’s no triumph of power to reign over somebody who is not even in control of themselves. I only watch the film once and I am not taking notes, really, during the public screening at the Bitcoin Bar, but I like it because it is auto-documentary not auto-fiction or auto-diary and as such, it is very precise. The film says, for someone like me in the conditions like the ones I occupy, here is what life is like. This is more matter of fact and less indulgent than saying; here is what life is like for me. At a party last month that was also all about art whores, the filmmakers wrote a few lines about a few of my friends. The women present were on average quite a bit younger than the men and looked fresh. Perhaps because of their age, or perhaps because of the care they put into their bodies and minds, but the vibe among the women was optimistic and exuberant. I thought this was nice. Nice, too, to catch purity in unexpected places while staying totally true. Friday Upper West Side Later, I am uptown and I am thinking about how I can become more self-disciplined so I can become more interesting. I am watching Pierre Le Fou at Lillian’s apartment on the Upper West Side and all the girls are dressed like characters in the film. Lilian keeps leaning out the window with a long skinny cigarette and I am drinking a glass of Sancerre because I just can’t quit. In this film, a very small man is holding a gun to a very beautiful girl’s head while she cuts her hair. The beautiful girl has a brunette bob, and she is wearing a red dress. The film is full of primary colors and very bright paint. When a man is stabbed, he bleeds red paint. Before a man explodes himself in dynamite at the end of the film, he paints himself blue. I like the film because the colors of the gore are all bright and fake like paint, and the colors of the scenery are all pastel and muted and lovely like real life. Summer in The Riviera. Beautiful people living a simple and crime-filled life. I have not watched very many films this year because I’ve been busy writing thirty-thousand-words-about-myself-per-week. In the last film I watched, a Japanese cat was exploded by a grenade, and when gore and guts spilled everywhere, I flinched and clenched my eyes shut. Do you want to leave, my friend asked, and what I wanted was to be resilient, but what I said was I don’t really care. Now, a girl in the film is sitting on a boat with a man, and she is talking about how the two have only known each other for a few million seconds. She’s such a stupid girl, Lillian says. I would say something like that, I respond. One-million-billion-seconds and one-million-billion-words. I am feeling bubbly when I am not feeling sick or shy. I am feeling like it’s time to be more light about it. When I look to my left, I see beautiful stained glass lamps and a defense surveillance tech-branded throw blanket. When I look to my right, I see an open window and all my friends leaning too far outside smoking skinny vogues. On the Internet, people are talking about how things are only interesting if they are true. Determinative reasoning then says, one should make what is true more interesting. Everything just became crystal clear. By which I mean, everything is operating on material terms now. DIRECTORY The full event calendar is now going to live on The Aleph - an exciting new platform by Noah Kumin of The Mars Review of Books. The Aleph is a marketplace and membership club for the arts, with an emphasis on supporting in-person events, production, and funding for artists. Programming featured will be intentional and curated, and include more opportunities for early-access and invitation-only events. If you would like to submit an event for consideration, please email me at chloegpingeon@gmail.com. Apply to join The Aleph here I will still be featuring select events on the blog, along with more eclectic or personal recommendations, news, and guest features. To start: David Rimanelli is perhaps my favorite person to follow on Instagram, as well as one of my favorite critics. Tonight, from 6:30pm at Tibet House, he will be reading, along with Kiely Sweatt and Sean Fabi. Tickets here.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1h49!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd95f9aef-d112-4dd9-a0fb-1610ba693067_1536x2048.jpeg, The Aleph, chloegpingeon@gmail.com, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!m6hb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5452bedc-f504-4cc0-a6f3-349820bdb9a3_1156x1138.png, David Rimanelli, here

Graph View

Backlinks