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Red Bull

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Red Bull

Article

Red Bull is a recurring brand in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 17, 2025 and February 25, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Sugar free red bull and gatorade and pizza and all”; “redbull green and coconut water all stacked side by side in the shop”; “You’re drinking red bull but it’s one am”. It most often appears alongside David, El Salvador, Hollywood.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 17, 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.

Here, There, Everywhere
March 17, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, March 9 I’ve been here, there, everywhere but there’s been no conviction to it. Yes, yes, take me to the opera now. I don’t pretend to think the things I don’t believe, but you rewire your brain away from nihilism, you spend a few years working on this task, really, and when all is said and done, resuscitation complete, you find in its place… an alarming passivity. That can’t be right. This week, I’ll be drawing new conclusions. Lying in bed and David is saying “I think giving up drinking is the solution and I think I’m ready to do that and, I might also take up eastern meditation.” “We're doing all this shit because we’re insincere swindling motherfuckers, we have no beliefs, our only beliefs are pleasure,” David is also saying. And I’m saying uh uh. And now David is saying, “put that in your substack, put in ‘i think i'm going to take up eastern meditation as well.” And now he shows me all these photos of his strange friends from the strange Decentralized Networking Platform stuff, or maybe these are just friends from parties or maybe, really, there is not much difference. But the friends are wearing big T-Shirts and flipping each other off, and David introduces me to the friends in the images like a cast of characters in a movie, or maybe like you introduce people in Real Life. Here is M. Here is C. and I say I know, I know, I know who these people are but no, I haven’t seen the photos yet, and so I let him scroll. You should also know: the sun returned today. Monday, March 10 In my Dialectics of NightLife piece that the new-ish magazine asked me to write, I am not sure how much of it all to include. "I don't include things like throwing things across the room and screaming," I told the girl at a party last week when she asked me how to be intimate online. "The throwing things and screaming is the most interesting part though," she said, which is what people always say when I share a disturbing detail from my life as an example of something I don't write about. I read something recently that has been making me reconsider my approach. Not to the nightlife piece. The approach to El Salvador, more. The approach in general, really. I am intrigued by things because they are strange. I find myself in a lot of situations as such. I don't want to cast judgments - this is bad or, this is good. But I think too, one can say yes, this part is good and this part is bad but I am not here because of good or bad, I am here because I was intrigued because this is strange. You are pretending that you just woke up and found yourself here one day, lying in the palm grove, lying on bitcoin beach, surrounded by red light and zyn and mastic gum of the gods. And maybe you were just kind of placed here. In another sense, you kind of sought this out. In another sense, you exercised a tremendous amount of agency and borderline being a stalker sometimes to then find yourself where you are now. Once I arrived, I was asked to stay, and then what was there left to say? Yes, ok I suppose I will then. This among other things is why I would be easily indoctrinated into a cult. I am not at present, in a cult. I've tried my luck with a few, but nothing quite has made the cut. Not the cut of Drawing Me In. The cut of Qualifying As A Cult. I'm going to a crypto conference tonight, David tells me and as if by instinct, as if like a child, residual panic at being left behind, at being left all alone in the first spring breeze, knees tucked up to my chest, watching the sunset on the terrace and being struck in a visceral way by how much time I continue to have - as if all of this would be so bad I pipe right up: "can I come??" And David says "are you interested in {technical stuff i don't understand} and I say no but I'm interested in crypto culturally, for the El Salvador piece. The guy giving the lecture is wearing a shirt that says something like "hey nerds" "what's up nerds" something like that, but I forgot to write it down. Sometimes, these conferences are fun because there are lots of characters and drinks and sometimes sparkly little powders though I don't like to really take these but it's fun when others are. This conference is a real conference capital C though. Or, a "meet up”, they say. Soho WeWork location and all. Sugar free red bull and gatorade and pizza and all. There is no fun to be had here. And so we make our way all through shiny Nolita instead. Tuesday, March 11 The things I overhear begin the process of reconsidering all over again. You confess that the knee jerk reaction is one of possession over things you do not even want. You confess that you do not want to tell that story even if this particular story is one that has always been yours. We go to Tiny Bar, and then the Odeon. Earlier, it was like they were doing a character study in the things you overheard. Wednesday, March 12 I went to St Dymphna tonight, but I didn't hear a single reading and I didn't watch Heat (1995) when I got home, even though David had it playing on the projector, even though he kept on playing scenes of significance over and over and over again. This is me and you, he kept saying, when some girl in some house with some glistening pool in Los Angeles calls her husband names like gambling addict and child the years keep passing by, and then the husband screeches off through Hollywood in a nice sleek car. It's not us, really, but this wouldn't be so bad. I want to party beautifully forever, David said a while ago. The key part being: beautifully. Maybe this is how people party in Los Angeles. This isn't really how people party in New York. And I should have gone to Poetry Project, to the after party for the Anne Imhoff show which I am guilty to admit I never saw in the first place and now it's too late, to the club, maybe. It's not that I worry what I missed, it is just that time passes faster when I am not here there everywhere, and I like it best when time slows down. In my dreams, my consciousness can take one second and turn it into one year. Here are the songs tonight. And the shoes are the shearling style cowboy boots my grandmother gave me from her closet last thanksgiving. Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4_QR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F600419e6-7163-4b25-809e-9aeb40bb7501_1179x658.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!v5mw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F84a58846-8c13-47c2-82bf-a7773d53ae96_1179x653.jpeg, Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Santa Teresa
April 10, 2025 · Original source
Friday, April 4 It's been such a haze since arriving in Costa Rica and at first I felt strange about it, like this isn't Good Behavior, treating a Big Trip kind of glibly, feeling a bit pouty and out of sorts and letting myself just be whisked away like it's nothing, when really it's never nothing, when really it's always touch and go and particularly something like this should make me feel ecstatic. Though, I kind of do feel ecstatic. I never really do become jaded. I quantify and calculate it all far too much to take anything for granted. You do kind of feel like you're floating, though. Cold beer to clutch between my knees on the sea plane that starts up all shaky and then scares me less even than a commercial plane because I can see into the cockpit and I can get the sense of how these pilots are navigating this thing. A cloud is just a cloud. I've been using too many words to inadequately explain myself. Send some bizarre texts upon landing that I hope will be encoded with… what, exactly? But, you’re in the jungle when you land. The sea plane slipped over the rainforest and then slipped out to sea, into the clouds. This part made me a bit nervous because there was nothing to spot except the horizon ahead. The scary part didn't last too long. Peninsula de Nicoya. Thick brambled forest by a single black tarmac. David sent me a video when he got here last week. The Jungle, he said, and now it’s like a hologram seeing it here myself. I really wasn’t going to come here. Two A.M. last night and the flights were so cheap that it felt like a glitch or something and then all I had to do was decide, ok, and then everything else was taken care of. There’s a driver at the gate for me. CHLOE, the sign says. That’s me, I say, and I point to the sign. I don’t know why I said it like that. It's a different vibe at the house here than in El Salvador. Surfer spiritualism over techno spiritualism. The aura here makes me feel significantly calmer. Because I am someone who accounts for danger at every turn (neurotic) I can remember being twelve or thirteen somewhere around here, handed a stick to ward off snakes at night, warned that don't you dare touch the frogs, the ants, they told me, fall screeching from the trees and it feels like a bullet wound when they bite you. But, “there is nothing actually scary here,” David’s friend tells me. “The main thing you have to worry about are these.” He shows me a picture of a scorpion. He tells me that the sting hurts a little, but after that the main thing is it makes your body feel all electric. “People sting themselves on purpose to get high,” David’s friends tell me. “They make you high???” I ask. One of the only things that scares me more than getting hurt is getting high. “No, not really,” David’s friend says. When I got here it felt kind of like I’d been teleported. David was there with an ATV where the car dropped me off, up a dirt road, by some stables and then he said - this might scare you but no backseat driving and then we roared up a mountain, nighttime already, I was left in a room in the hills in the jungle alone while the others offroad up and down and up and down until everyone was here for dinner. You can see the stars in a way that is so special here. I’d been told about this part, but it’s better to see for yourself. You couldn’t make out what parts were ocean and what parts were horizon but you could see that the darkness was placid and lovely and it stretched out quite some ways. You could see where there were villages, because lights close to the ground edged up against the stars in the sky but lacking any visual markers to ground them, these villages appeared to be hovering, unmoored. “You’ll be able to see the ocean in the morning,” David told me. So, in the morning, I thought, I will be able to distinguish which parts are ocean, and which parts are sky. Saturday, April 5 In the morning, there is a gecko on the ceiling and a dog outside my door. Chat GPT got way better overnight, I am told. It’s harder for me to suss out the vibe here. They are bullish on AI, but they are hesitant about some of the other stuff. We’re not really doing much of the hacker house stuff anyways, this time, though. Back down the mountain, and we’re in a hotel, and there’s surfer girls with pretty hair in pretty dresses dancing barefoot in all the nightclubs here. The heat makes a run in the morning unbearable. Even the walk to the shop is heavy and thick but I don't mind this. The only thing I do every single morning is walk for an hour and write while I walk, but the heat makes this hard. It's ok, because I can float instead. Yerba mate and corona extra and white claw and paloma in a can and redbull green and coconut water all stacked side by side in the shop, but I leave empty handed. Before, we got cold brew mixed with orange juice and a cashew avocado tart at a cafe run by the girlfriend of one of David’s friends. Since I tried it out and basically just became an alcoholic bartending my way around Eastern Europe at eighteen, I have kind of found the whole nomad thing to be spiritually ugly. Like it's something for mid thirties men that look older from the partying who stop you in back alleys in Croatia and tell you things like the key to it all is to never buy a couch. And they would say it like you were supposed to really get it. And you did get it, you got what they meant by it at least, but the thought was just a bit half baked and unconvincing. Ok, so, I wouldn't buy a couch but then what? Then what would I do? What should I do? I didn't want to stay listless and skimming the surface forever. New York is kind of empty too when you aren't living at least a little bit gently, and so these are the different pieces I am trying to parse out. I would stay here for a while with a project. David drops a chip on the beach lined with hermit crabs and he creates this huge commotion. Anarchy, really. All the little crabs begin to rip each other to shreds. "I hope the big one comes in and destroys them all," David says, regarding the hermit crab pile-on situation. There's not really any metaphor here, he’s just being vaguely sadistic. It does happen as you would expect. One big hermit crab sees its opportunity, identifies his leg up in this whole situation or perhaps, they aren't the brightest creatures, perhaps it just wants to try its lot at the prize like all the others and is surprised to find itself emerge victorious. He makes a clean break with the chip down the beach. The crabs kind of look like spiders from my vantage point. A mass of little tendrils for legs chasing after someone six times their size. They all have the death drive, because when they do catch up, it's not good news for any animal involved. An underdog swoops in and gets the chip. I don't know, I lose sight of it all. You have a target on your back when carrying the bounty though. If I was a hermit crab, I wouldn’t risk it. I put my head underwater in the ocean to get myself sorted. I walk back through a little bit of jungle and then past the fishermen in Malpaís while David turns around the ATV. Soles of my shoes are all sticky on the pavement. Herd of goats in the road. The heat makes all my thoughts become all slippery and smooth. If I spent a month here, I could learn how to become all tan and bendy and strong. Sometimes, I become slippery and smooth. I could spend the first part of my month learning how to notice when my mind becomes like this, and I could spend the second part learning how to make the feeling last. I would stay here for a while with a project… WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, April 10 From 6pm - 8pm at Blade Study — Clare Koury presents the opening of solo exhibition Scaling Laws For An Open EnTrainment Structure. With this installation, Clare Koury is addressing the part of the color spectrum that eyes don’t see.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yrdc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F78d590ff-7675-437a-bec3-6777487c94e1_916x372.png, Blade Study, Clare Koury, Scaling Laws For An Open EnTrainment Structure
Life-in-a-lab
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Monday Preston, Connecticut Everything in the woods is still and stone and snow, which is the sort of place that’s nice to be when there is Saturn going into Aries moon and the lent beginning and compulsions-to-be-writing-everything-down and some other omens, too, that I am hoping to believe in. Lots of sounds and smells to float in between, and best to be kind of light about it. Nothing so wrong with seeking purity in pure places. I am sitting by the fire pressed against a warm stone floor, and the clock just struck midnight. I was waiting for the clock to strike midnight, because I was waiting for a new week to begin. Nothing feels too different. A few days ago, when the clock struck midnight and it was Friday-the-thirteenth, I was sitting in a glass apartment in the sky surrounded by things that don’t belong to me. Kind of beige and huge place with stock-image-skyline views and a lot of rumors swirling regarding who the apartment belonged to, but no one famous ever actually shows up. In the huge marble bathroom, I sized myself up in the unnervingly clean mirror and felt fifty-percent-miserable and fifty-percent-fun. I went home after that, and in the morning, it was hazy dawn and the day was not feeling particularly unlucky though I knew better than to get complacent. I waited kind of breathless, and when the clock struck midnight again and the curse was lifted, I donned normal clothes and hailed a cab and arrived at a party full of diet-mountain-dew and magazines about Japan. You’re late, my friends said. You’re superstitious. You’re drinking red bull but it’s one am and you’re wearing normal clothes and listening to a DJ in a normal room and the playlist is normal and everyone keeps introducing themselves by alias like ‘Pretty Girl’ or ‘Whatever.’ I was given gifts and hats and pamphlets and the night was nice because my mind was crystal clear. I spent the next day waiting kind of breathless. I took the six-line to the metro-north to southwest station to harlem-valley where I stood outside on a winter-warm evening. Blue hour dusk. Looked over at an abandoned mental hospital on one side and an Evangelical Center on the other side, across the road. The abandoned mental hospital had a sign in a cracked window etched in bright blue duct tape and the sign said WAIT. The sky was turning dark with streaks of something sort of cotton candy pale, and my father called to say he was late because of house fires along the road. All my annoyance at tardiness and stranded state and train station strips between abandoned institutions dissipated in an instant. WAITING by the cracked windows and duct-tape-text in blue. The Evangelical Center had been meant to open ten years ago, but the buildings were loaded with asbestos and mold, and so it never did. My father arrived on dirt roads out of winter mist with headlights like a beam. I considered my allegiances and decided they align mostly with places like here. You wouldn’t think that in Connecticut you could find places so open road empty with absolutely nothing around, my father and I remarked. We drove under covered bridges and over frozen rivers. When we arrived at the cabin, there were vertical nordic skis jutting out from the snowbanks and the driveway remained totally iced over. We had coq-de-vin for dinner, and I did not have any wine. The town in Connecticut is close enough to New York City, and no one really answers when I fire off some questions about commuter-local-population-ratios. Close to the house, there is a cognitive behavioral therapist who lays patients out on a couch in a hut that is mostly glass and a little bit of wood, and is hovering over the river. Who needs therapy when you have a view like that, everyone says, every time we drive past the hut. Nobody needs therapy if they have access to the outdoors and the capacity for lifestyle interventions, I pipe up, because while I have been trying to be less petulant-for-no-reason, sometimes there is a reason for petulance being; it is nice to say the opposite thing, and sometimes the opposite thing I am saying is true. The hut is not really that close by. There is a long driveway and lots of silent snow. There is a typewriter in the window, and everything is made of soft carved wood. Some of the wood is painted blue, but for the most part, the stain is gentle tan. I am sitting by the fire and I am taking some satisfaction in boxing things up. Tinned salmon and a heart shaped bowl. White socks and pearl earrings and a beautiful hand made card. A candle and a very pretty bookmark. Soon, sunlight will begin to stream through the open windows, and I hope that when this process begins, I will sleep through it totally unaware. The house is very quiet, and I have become very happy. Earlier, Celia came downstairs and she asked me why I was still awake. I don’t go to sleep til six-am, I said, which was an obstinate and kind of juvenile response. Oh really, Celia said, and she shook her head with vague indifference. I’m veiling my diaries in pretension in lieu of anonymity, I explained. Everyone’s been super into only saying things that are true, Celia shrugged. I wish it was still summer so I could say what I mean, I said. Celia looked at me kind of gently. How would it being summer change things regarding saying what you mean?, she asked. Upstairs, I turned on a rainforest stone shower and stood under the water and winter skylight looking up at stretches of dark and stretches of stars. Celia caught me on the landing on the stairway as we circled our way back through this beautiful and strange house. Sun due to come up soon. Navy and white carved clock above me. Handmade wooden cover over the refrigerator so that even the appliances are beautiful. Maybe you’d be happier if you wrote about something other than yourself, Celia said. True, I said. Everyone moving like ghosts in the shadows up all night in a cabin surrounded by snow and full of lofts and quits and beautiful food and drink. 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_!G4hM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32c19f02-745f-42b8-961f-2b9d53e6e39e_768x508.png, 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

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