Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

Art Week

25 min read

Art Week

Article

Art Week is a recurring event in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 09, 2025 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “It’s Art Week in New York, which means less to me than it used to”; “even less to me this year than Art Week did the week before”. It most often appears alongside ARDOR, Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Le Bain.

Metadata

  • Category: Events
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 09, 2025
  • Last seen: September 12, 2025

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.

City Built on Crystals
September 09, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 1 On the train to Coney Island, my friends are talking about the motifs that keep occurring. It's the sort of thing that happens to you when you have a pure heart, one of my friends is explaining. It's the sort of thing that people try to do to Real Life Angels, my other friend is explaining. Real life angels aren't real, I am saying, though I understand her point. The train is streaking through open air with towns on both sides. Housing projects rising up beyond that. Fallen green leaves and gray pebbles on the edges of the tracks. I have had these concepts of destruction explained to me before, only then it was by my mother or my friends in Miami and they called it Evil Eye. Here, they call it Devils and Angels. Real life Demons. I have been spending a lot of time this summer, trying to parse out the difference. Later, we emerge onto the boardwalk to find Curtis Sliwa in his red barret at the edge of the Atlantic. Police officers and children and men with snake tattoos in the ocean. There is live music at Salt and Sizzle and a ferris wheel that is one-hundred-years-old-and-never-any-accidents and the sky turns blue and purple and they cancelled the fireworks last year on account of someone drowning and due respect. We miss them this year of our own accord. When I was in love I spent a lot of time thinking about the apocalypse and feeling kind of giddy and aloof in this anticipation, convinced that the best way to die was euphoria and so end times while the center held would be a relief above all. When I smoked cigarettes and was a teen I would spend a lot of time pondering pop-psychology notions of optimistic nihilism and watching reddit atheists evangelize online. Now, I'm on the F-train back towards block-party-bars and my friends are shooting photos of their merch line, standing in front of the train doors as they open and close and I prefer to stay seated. Mostly aware of how dehydrated I am, which is a relief insofar as it diminishes all less corporeal thoughts. At Time Again, we make new friends with rare and inquisitive souls, which is really what the end of summer is all about. Writing on my phone on the walk home. Scribbling with kind of blurry eyes like an ipad baby on Delancey Street about the things that one has left to lose. Scribbling kind of incoherently about Health and Strong and Pervasive Senses. Scribbling Mother Teresa’s Rules For Humility. Speak as little as possible of oneself and Yield in discussion even though one is right and; well - what else am I supposed to do besides accept and embrace a Strong and Pervasive sense that things are as they are? Things were one way and now they are another. Things are harsher now in some ways, and more gentle in others. Tuesday, September 2 Woke up feeling very concerned about the decay of my physical form as a result of my bad habits and also by my newfound sense of passivity which I hope is driven by surrender and not by cynicism but one can really not be too sure. Woke up to a brand new delusion. In my dreams, someone was knocking on the door. They woke me up screaming. I stayed very quiet in response. Sunlight through my windows that I cannot bring myself to drape with curtains. Looked through the peephole. No one was there. Here are things I need to do: email the priests at Saint Joseph's to join OCIA and consider becoming Catholic despite my generally waspy sensibility. Finish and publish my substack. Create publicity materials for the play, go to class tomorrow, go to screening at Anthology Film tomorrow, write write write. Conjure up some sort of novel-like plot out of my hundreds of thousands of words of musings I keep in secret online documents. Make final edits on El Salvador piece and hope for the best. Conjure up some sort of plausible plot for my novel about gnosticism and also schizophrenia in people who seek to approximate the feeling of being famous by having friends online. Drop off laundry. Workout a lot. Maybe go sober. Certainly be sober-for-today. Today I am Cleansing. Today I am proud of myself in some ways and disappointed in others. Over plates of octopus and shrimp in lemon mustard sauce and pita and eggplant dip, Iris asks if she can treat me. Treat me to what, I asked. Do treatments for you, Iris explains. Treat me with iodine and thyroid and hypnosis. Treat me with methods opposite to my own. My own being mostly, a hysterical dipping in and out of notions of asceticism. Ok to some treatment, I say. Iris and I walk to the shops. The sky is still light but it is getting colder now. Iris buys dish soap and I slip sea kelp spray into my pocket. I have become quite destabilized by my afternoon visit to the glass apartment in the sky with the revolving doors. Not my apartment. No one's apartment. I am less like an orphan now. Iris and I walk back outside and down towards Seward Park. Iris says Sam knows a good aura cleanser. Not that I think the aura in the glass apartment in the sky is necessarily dark or doomed, Iris clarifies. I’d been telling Iris about some theories on the aura of things as dark and doomed. An invisible string but it was most of all bad. Ultimatums of gnosticism but they were delivered with nefarious intent.. Narcissistic to assume spiritual implications in the everyday, obviously. But how does one explain why they feel like they are floating by the time they are drifting up the stairs? On the Internet, they are making up real life retreats to enter the void. On the internet, they will take you to the Real Life House where you can Understand Real Life Consciousness. On the Internet, you can't live forever. Everyone realized that a few years back and I realized too, a few years after that. In Real Life you can maybe live forever, though. Everyone hopes so. I have been worrying, lately, that I hope so too. Wednesday, September 3 It’s Art Week in New York, which means less to me than it used to, besides for a pleasant rise in energies and things whirling back to life. I go to the first installment of the Marjorie Cameron series at Anthology Film Archive on account of Emillia’s recommendation and a slightly uneasy interest in the occult, tonight. An interest in witches who used to dance in a ring of rocking horses by my childhood home and a drive through Lily Dale with Riley in other lives, a few lives before this one. All that greenery and a long road alongside a lake towards the Psychic Capital Of The World. Hub of Mediums. Salmon Rushdie had been stabbed nearby a few years back. A psychic in Rhode Island had told me things would happen as I wanted them too but it would be first a thing of waiting, and secondly a thing of new architectures and spaces given that I’d been dealing in impossible conditions for awhile. Trying to make something stick in an Architecture of Unhappiness for a while. I stayed up til dawn over the weekend. Awoken to a Providence necklace placed around my neck and a burning desire to remove myself from the organ donor registry just in case. I worried about the morality of seeking loopholes as it pertained to the Providence Necklace, but a few days have passed and now it is Wednesday, early evening, tuck the tag under the collar of my shirt and began my hovering walk towards things that happen. The screening shows a Curtis Harrington film called Night Tide (1961), and it is about a girl who is a siren or perhaps it is just about Psychological Warfare, the ending leaves things a bit unclear. I've been nostalgic for the kind of California where I've never really been before. Nostalgic for things that never happened which I think is less a thing of clairvoyance and more a sense of how it all slips away but regardless; the shots are all of witchy Venice Beach and an apartment over the carousel that overlooks the sea and there is a bonfire on the rocks and some dancing that becomes a bit possessed due to dark forces - pulling my hair over my eyes like a blindfold for these parts - but I am thinking I could live in a place like this in spite of perhaps some evil. I have always thought I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in this way Thursday, September 4 Last night, I turned off the air conditioning and spilled Diet Pepsi on the baby pink rug in my sleep. Mom has shipped out baby blue curtains with white stripes and New York (the place where all my problems are) is starting to become a place that oscillates into something more calm. Sophie suggested baby pink curtains, and so I am making compromises in my mind. Compromising my own opinions and the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in things improving drastically through the help of water in glass bottles and red light therapy and self hypnosis and religious conversion and swapping out the Cool White Linear Fluorescent Light Bulbs for something warmer. Everything becomes warm and still and the air is kind of heavy. I can lie very still for a while. Not forever, but definitely for now. You should just become one of those sociopathic writers who does insane things for the sake of writing, Iris advised me a few days ago. Yeah, I said. Like go to consciousness school in Argentina or conduct strange experiments with materiality on myself and others. Adopt a regiment of strange injections or move to Venice Beach to become Catholic and fight the occult there, too. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New World in New York City. Closing my eyes and imagining Venice Beach as a magical little enclave with a witchy apartment over the carousel by the sea and arched doorways and conch shells and a jazz club and massage parlors and psychics on the piers. If I became a ruthless psychopath, what could I do in a place like this? In New York City (the city built on crystals). I am not feeling so ruthless. Self-experimentation without self-possession mostly leading towards destruction of a pretty boring variety. At least we don't live boring lives, I used to be told. There is nothing more boring than this, I used to say in response. Friday, September 5 Come in, come in, three psychics beckon on Sullivan Street, but I am pretty clear about how things have been and where they are going, and I would prefer to look for motifs in patterns and symbols and psychosomatic symptoms which reach a peak and then; abandon your whole entire life. That is one thing the psychics could tell me to do. Abandon your whole entire life. They could tell me to buy a whole new personality. I could buy a good fortune swimming in tea leaves and an aura cleansing from the psychics on Sullivan Street. I could buy a membership to witchcraft school and a flat in Venice Beach and a conflicted conscience when it comes to forces of good and evil and certainly, to things like health, sobriety, longevity. It's enticing to create pseudo intellectual or pseudo spiritual explanations for bad behavior when in reality things are obviously much more simple. Most actions are much too plain to qualify as any sort of performance or definitely any art. I'm working on becoming stupider, I told Iris. Will I become stupider? I asked the psychics. Will the apocalypse come sooner or later if the collective consciousness ideates on it or tries to stave it off? Is it better to be witchy but self protective, or ascetic but operating with self abandon. Where can one buy self possession? Taking the C-Train to Fort Greene Summer Fairyland where my dad and Sylvie wait for me at Aita and so everything is better. Plums and peaches and ricotta and octopus which the girls behind us are saying they don't eat after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020). Girls love to say they don't eat octopus after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020) but perhaps I am heartless, and I mostly just found the documentarian in that film to be kind of deranged and unreliable. Beef tartar and potato chips and Sylvie is talking about how she's aware of the balance of power in every single conversation and I'm saying I'm literally never aware of that I'm literally always just seeking equilibrium in any interaction that matters because conversation exists to reach understanding and Sylvie is saying no you are just always making sure that you are the one with the power in every conversation. I say no and she says yes and I say can we seek some equilibrium and she says you make sure that won't ever happen. The combat stops. My dad is asking Sylvie's boyfriend why he seeks intellectual inquiry. Sylvie's boyfriend is pointing out the famous people peppered around the bar. Goodbye you power hungry beast, I am telling Sylvie. My dad drives me back towards Manhattan. Animal skulls are scattered around his mini van and he says I can have a deer jaw for my new place if I want. Wrong turn through the Hubert Tunnel. Twenty-two dollar toll. Drop me off at the most Satanic Nightclub in New York to sulk soberly at the edge of an indoor pool and really lean into nihilism insofar as - what if we stayed for a while? I don't stay for a while. Manhattan night is teeming with people and the city is built on crystals. Good or bad ones? I haven't decided yet. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, September 9 From 7pm - 11pm at Night Club 101 — AltCitizen 15 Year Anniversary Show series launches with The Kickoff. Hosted by Brittany Marino. Featuring Lulu Van Trapp, Suo, D. Treuit. From 10pm - late, after party downstairs | Tickets: $15 advance, $20 doors
Inline links: Night Club 101, AltCitizen, The Kickoff
Perfect Little Life
September 12, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, September 7 Woke up to something amazing happening. More rain outside and also, a message from Emma. How are you? Emma asks. Like no time has passed at all, though of course, years have. There are other things to think about first. Octopus and shrimp salad and some cicen cheese at Tashkent Market. Interrogate one’s own sincerity. I am certain that Emma lives a very full and rich life now. I am not sure where in the world she is. I will know this soon. The first time I met Emma, her mom drove her to my house as a friend of a friend on her sixteenth birthday. I made signs to welcome my new acquaintance. Strung up HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMMA and WE HEART EMMA on poster board in neon sharpie above the wooden porch to greet her when she arrived. Nice to meet you Emma, I remember saying. The formality was awkward because I really wanted Emma to already be my friend. Later, I posted a photo of Emma and I hugging on the beach. Happy birthday Emma, I posted. Like plastering our pseudo-friendship online would make it real. After Emma and I became friends, and after Emma got her learner’s permit a few months after that, she would drive around Natick, Massachusetts with me hidden in the back of her trunk looking for parties that we’d find posted on YikYak. We would come home disappointed, usually, drinking a few warm beers in her parents’ basement or sitting with people we didn’t really know on the outer edges of my parents back yard. A few years had passed that way, and then another year hitchhiking around the Balkans after high school. Emma had convinced me to come bartend in Budapest and so I’d lost or maybe gained another life, here, drinking liquor and taking pills from strange cups in hostel hallways. Hitching rides from strange women across the Montenegro border. We’d bought loaves of bread and tomato sauce and bottles of wine to drink in the backseat and we'd driven for quite some time along coastlines and corn fields. They burned brush to prevent forest fires in this part of the world, and so often the sides of the highway would be almost totally ablaze. Emma and I were always half asleep, half drunk, half larping as destitute and disassociated and developing an early onset case of Peter Pan syndrome as mostly mine but kind of our cerebral ambitions paled in comparison to the magical ephemerality of our alcoholic, older, nomadic, wandering compatriots. My best friend Emma was more solid than I was. She had traveled for a while longer while I washed up in a hotel room in Albania and then, a flight back to Boston. Emma sold coffee in Morocco and then attended Georgetown. Emma calls mid afternoon. Are you still in New York? Emma asks me. She’s in the car in San Diego and she’s driving home from the beach with her boyfriend. Emma and her boyfriend are laughing. The perfect little life. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New York studio apartment and I’m feeling kind of giddy because here I am, suddenly, with this perfect little window into the perfect little life. It’s exactly as I suspected. I talk quickly at Emma for about twenty minutes when I pick up the phone, mostly recounting the events of the spring and summer, but there are other things, too. Sorry, I say when I finish my story. Sorry sorry sorry. Emma sighs, though she remains cheerful. I always thought you’d marry young, Emma says. Are you ok? Emma asks. You should talk about yourself now, I tell Emma. And so Emma tells me that she is in San Diego with her boyfriend. They have been there since the spring now, and they have started to make some friends. They are driving home from the beach. They are stopping for food. Emma is in a city on the Pacific coast of California known for its beaches, parks and warm climate. Emma is on the edge of a deep harbor that is home to a large active naval fleet. I imagine that it is misty there sometimes and sunny at other times and the houses are bright colored beach bungalows and they are always filled up with a little bit of sand. All my dreams this summer have been about California, I tell Emma. There is an OctoberFest party in San Diego, Emma tells me. Come to San Diego, Emma urges me. Do you surf a lot?, I ask Emma. Where are you getting food? Is everything made of wood and is everyone barefoot all the time and do you buy blue dresses at second-hand shops and wear them as you wander down the coast? Do you feed seagulls scraps of fish as they fly over your perfect white wooden balcony and do you go to the carnival and get massages at open air studios on the pier and is everything kind of pastel and creaky and at what pace does time pass? So, I will go to San Diego. Not in October but sometime soon. Sometime in the spring. Emma and Arthur will drive me around in their perfect little car and I will sleep on their perfect little couch and I will drink Corona with lime and wear a bikini in March and everything will be kind of pastel and creaky and I imagine I won’t be too aware of time passing at all. I will be embraced and absorbed by a life that does not belong to me. Maybe it’ll be like Never Land. Maybe I’ll stay forever. Monday, September 8 In New York City, people feed birds scraps of food and then grab them by their bare hands, too. In Washington Square Park, the tourists from Prague are doing this today. Washington Square Park, which is peppered with falling leaves and fountain mist and Bad Luck Spots, which I will never make the mistake of stepping on again. The park is still green but becoming less so. I’ve been praying for the cold, and now it is almost here. It is September 8th. It is Day One of being Cerebral and Ascetic and I am feeling very horrified that I ever thought it might be good to opt for any other alternative path. I am feeling regretful for my experimentations in self-abandonment and trying-on-new-personalities though, I suppose, this is where God comes in. And it was a God filled day yesterday, which is something I still hope to be somewhat watchful with and let things happen to me rather than intellectualize it all. The greatest thing is to Love and Know and Be Loved And Known, strangers kept on telling me yesterday. I already knew this, but I wrote it down anyway. Write it down and filter it through new contexts. Begin the day. It is Monday now. It is September 8th. I run into Emilia at Caffe Reggio, where I always sit and where she always finds me. You seem kind of volatile, she tells me. You should write about God if you are sick of writing about yourself. You should write about art. You should not write about politics. You should come to Slovenia. I was sitting in a church last night and someone was laughing outside. The laughter was reverberating inside. The laughter was distorting sound waves off the walls and causing interference with the incense and the air and with the silence. Because it was, otherwise, silent. Felt very frozen. Felt like fall. Felt like it was all beautiful even here in stupid NYC. Felt like I slowly noticed myself, shaking. What's your favorite book, a stranger asked me at the bar, later. V by Thomas Pynchon I said, because that's the book I read last and my mind was moving kind of slowly. What's your favorite film, the stranger asked. Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix because that is the film I watched and liked last or also; Manhattan and Match Point, I said. What's your favorite book, I asked the stranger. The stranger smiled. I always say The Bible when people ask me that. Tuesday, September 9 In the criss-crossed wood-roofed apartment, the lights start to flicker around eight pm which is a good reminder, then, that one is never supposed to linger in the sort of place like this. One is supposed to live in a city like this so that one might pace around and wait for omens. It is Fashion Week which means even less to me this year than Art Week did the week before. It is energies and after parties and humiliation rituals when I'm wearing my cotton non-synthetic workout wear all around Soho at a time like this and; all of this of course, means nothing at all and so this week is just like any other. This summer passed kind of dusty and endless and I do not feel sorry for myself anymore because first of all there is no need for that it is just one life all at once and second of all, Accidie is the only truly mortal sin and so one must proceed with caution. I sat with Amelia in bars with sparkling water in June for a while because I just could not go home. I sat with other sorts of substances for a while after that and I took it too far. Day One (trying again) of being Ascetic and Cerebral tonight. September 9. 999. People on the Internet say that means something and I'm good at taking people at their word. Sitting in the basement of Night Club 101 at the AltCitizen show with Joe and Darby and a cup of Suju waiting for the after party to start. The basement of Night Club 101 feels kind of like a high school music room classroom particularly now, particularly empty. Joe and Darby and I are talking about the gap between self possession and self awareness and a Kinsey Scale sort of method of categorizing people this way. Self possessed people often lacking self awareness and vice versa. The lowest form of discourse being discourse on discourse. Smart people talking about ideas average people talking about events stupid people talking about other people; though, I sort of disagree with this concept. Other people are the root of all loftier things like "Ideas", I am saying. It's like The Backrooms down here, Darby is saying. It's like a kind of weird vibe but we don't want to leave. We're near the bathrooms and so others keep drifting by but they don't want to stay. Fabulous outfits. Rockstar Girlfriends. Los Angeles apparel unitard and big black boots lining up for the restroom or to buy socks that say I CAN DO ANYTHING ON DRUGS. Patchwork style neon dress and small gray loafers, silver ballet flats leather pants light green linen v neck top. Lots of girls with long and flowy and jet black hair here. Lace black dresses that look like spiderwebs paired with emerald necklaces. Lots of guys in jeans with long and curly hair or long and greasy hair and they all are carrying guitars. I'm perched in the bleachers in the basement with my one kind of SEC-school-style-tattoo and an A-line dress watching everyone kind of wistfully. So, there were a few different lives and now there is something else. Maybe in the next one, I will pick a life like the club kids. Micro-bangs and rock music. Fall asleep in Bushwick or in the back of a bus. Buy a bus and drive across the country with a lust for Music above all. Drive past things like diners in Wyoming or sacred hot springs in New Mexico or the haunted Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire or Motel 6s and 8s somewhere along the way. Drive to California wearing True Religion low rise jeans and shredded tees. Drive all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Can't stop thinking about the Pacific Ocean. Drive to San Diego. Wash up on Emma and Arthur's door. I would do fewer things each day in this life, but maybe each of them would matter more. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Friday, September 12 From 7:30pm - 9:00pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — It’s your last week to see ARDOR - a very special play following a group of nine artists and friends on an annual retreat to their aging patrons Vermont farmhouse. Nothing and everything has changed and will change.
Inline links: Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, ARDOR

Graph View

Backlinks