Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

Ellie

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Ellie

Article

Ellie is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between May 28, 2024 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “there is Ellie’s MFA/MA (?) Graduation Party on the Upper East Side”; “Ellie and I will be co-hosting”; “Ellie and I go to Bacaro for dinner”. It most often appears alongside New York, Chloe Pingeon, Jean’s.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: May 28, 2024
  • Last seen: March 06, 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.

COLLECTED AGENDA #2
May 28, 2024 · Original source
I’m flying back from Texas and then I’m in an Uber to the Lower East Side to collect things and then I’m in an Uber to the West Village and then I’m going to sleep. New York feels all new again, all because I left for only three days. I’m thinking I should leave more. I’m thinking I should cherish the night but then I’m so tired. I go to sleep so early, but outside, there is Ellie’s MFA/MA (?) Graduation Party on the Upper East Side, and an EGirl party at Le Bain. Later, I’m hearing I missed a night that was spectacularly fun on both fronts.
Inline links: Ellie’s, EGirl, Le Bain
COLLECTED AGENDA #6
July 27, 2024 · Original source
Tonight: Saturday, July 27 at 8pm - Hansen Shi celebrates the launch of his debut novel THE EXPAT — “a spy novel following a disaffected young Asian American software engineer who hates his NPC life in San Francisco and gets recruited as a Chinese industrial spy by a sexy CCP honeypot”. Ellie and I will be co-hosting. DM for address.
Inline links: Hansen Shi, THE EXPAT, Ellie
Indulging in the Eschaton
October 28, 2024 · Original source
Ellie and I go to Bacaro for dinner. Meet up with more friends, after. Telling secrets in a garden later, but now I can’t remember what.
Inline links: Ellie, Bacaro
The screenings end around ten - there’s an after party at Shinsen and I do want to go but then Ellie and I walk to get food and then the whole thing feels a little daunting and then we’re wandering past Cipriani Downtown, glittering, gauche, definitionally hedonistic with the stakes being only that of exhibitionism. I, half joking, suggest we stop for a drink, but then we’re hovering by the awning and then we’re whisked inside, seated by the bar, order one bellini each but the cups never run dry, refilled wordlessly by the Italian bartender in front of us after every other sip. Soon, the night is sparkly. Glistening with what is not all gold, but which all certainly appears as such in this parallel universe where pleasure is anticipated and met. No end in sight, I pry myself away.
Inline links: Shinsen, Cipriani Downtown
Counterculture in America
November 12, 2024 · Original source
Last week, I linked to Hannah's piece about aesthetic and moral nihilism and value judgment. If you didn't read it then, I am linking it again here. Today, on my phone, I see many things like text saying if you put down your phone it's still 2003, overlayed with a photo of a river - sentiments which are kind of true and kind of annoying because they think they’re clever and they're not that clever and also, they are not that true. A few weeks ago, Ellie asked if there is such a thing as counterculture in 2024, and if so what is it? Outside of vague anecdotes and vibes, how would a contemporary counterculture be defined? I thought about this a lot, particularly in the context of downtown, heterodoxy, material vs aesthetic vs moral platitudes, blah blah blah but you get what I mean. In her GQ piece, Magdalene points out that "if Dimes Square really was some psyop to convert conservative-curious young hipsters into full-on Republican voters, it succeeded." Granted, most things you think are psyops probably aren't, people are pretty predictable, unlikely coincidences were probably actually pretty likely all along but I digress, because the question remains -- Ok, so now what?
Inline links: Hannah's, here, Ellie
I’m recalling things in bullet points. Diner at Casino with Ellie and Shannon. Lychee martini, then dirty martini then steak tartare and chicken and pasta, etc. Then, The Magician publication party at Sovereign House. I’ve been writing about this book - it’s very nice to see the short film that accompanies it. Here is something I have written about this book - I hope to share the rest of it it soon:
Inline links: Casino, Shannon, The Magician
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
November 19, 2024 · Original source
“Community is a different word for lineage. the people that are still here tonight... that says a lot about you.” Beckett reads about The Providence Hotel, Chris reads about The Circus, Adeline reads poems. Afterwards, I stick around for a while. Ellie arrives. I try to get late dinner but there’s no one seating diners at this hour. I walk back to Sovereign House. The UFC fight is playing now. On a split screen, Mike Tyson is telling a small child that he doesn’t dream of legacy because when you die, your ego dies with you. When I get home, I have a text from a number I haven’t saved yet. It’s a photo with Ellie and her friend that I don’t remember taking. “The Three Graces,” it says. “Loved meeting you xoxo Penny” WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, November 19 In her Substack, Natasha Stagg recommends The White Ribbon screening at Metrograph this afternoon at 3:30pm. I imagine you might find a strange appeal in luxuriating in a weekday afternoon theater experience that will leave you feeling as awful as this film is sure to. Natasha also recommends the new menu in the commissary, but Shannon recently told me it's fallen far from its glory days. I'll have to stop by soon (maybe tomorrow, at 3:30pm) to see for myself.
Inline links: split screen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!grbu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa9cf1b99-fc72-43b0-8bff-6c6b9ba3d33b_1149x765.jpeg, Natasha Stagg, screening, Metrograph, menu, Shannon
Moral Framework
December 16, 2024 · Original source
Monday, December 9 A busy day. One quickly finds this to be the solution to all malignant indulgences. Before a comedy show at Jean’s, Natasha and I go to Altro Paradiso for dinner. It’s an early dinner in the rain. Madelyn works here, and I’ve been meaning to visit for a while. I’ve been meaning to apply for a job here, too, but the list of things I’ve been meaning to do on that front continues to pile up. We order many things on the menu. The house specialties that we did not order somehow seem to keep materializing on our table as well. It’s like magic. It’s a special night. Rumor has it: Marina Abromovic was dining here this afternoon. Rumor has it, she’s dined here twenty times. Altro Paradiso is a well lit restaurant - I read something I liked about well lit restaurants this week and now I can’t recall where. The premise was: enough of this haze. Some people want to see their food. Some people want to see and be seen. Tonight, I drink Ciro Picariello. It’s like white wine but it sparkles. I drink a cocktail with peach purée and peach liquor. I drink a dirty martini. I eat olives, bread and ricotta, finocchio, another salad with fig and orange, mushroom pasta shaped like pillows, lemon pasta shaped like thick noodles, branzino, gelato. It’s a winter feast. I haven’t had a feast like this in my recent recollection. After, the rain has stopped but the evening is still misty. We hail a cab. We’re too late for Jean’s. Natasha is good at spotting famous people. Rebecca Black walks by. EmRata’s ex husband. Some other people, too. We go the The Nines, which is very festive, but where everyone is very rude. We go back to Jean’s. The show is over, they let us in, but there's no point in lingering now. I loved tonight, I say when I get home. A sign of mental stability is drinking alcohol and not hating every second of it. I know for some people, it's the opposite, but this is how it works for me. Tuesday, December 10 The line to get into the Richard Kern book launch is too long and it's raining. I see Annabel and Ellie outside. I see that Berlin blogger who only wears all black or all white and her TikTok DJ boyfriend. "I need to become someone who's 'list me or miss me'", a girl in line sighs. We're still waiting in the rain. She said this in a way like she was kidding, but I repeat the sentiment with no humility to David later. "We should become 'list me or miss me’,” I say. David has a tendency to bludgeon his way through lines. "We should become 'list me or i'm going to fucking kill you’,” David says. After I abandon the Richard Kern line, I go to Lucien. I run into a few people there. The expected and the unexpected. There are things I'm very excited about these days. Excitement is risky - it's unwise to tempt fate and it's destructive to celebrate accomplishments you are yet to achieve, but I am excited. Full of ideas again. Everyone at Lucien is an actor. That must be so cool, I say. I'm so full of sincerity, I think. This time of year can be so full in general that it begins to feel uneasy. This type of luxury isn't mine to claim and it's certainly not sustainable. The hedonism feels truly hedonistic today, though. It's energetic, not coated with something darker. I'm having so much fun. David wants to go to Frog Club for banana chiffon pie. "Why am I so broken up about Frog Club closing?” asks David. "You've never been to Frog Club," I say. "Yeah, that's probably why," says David. Risotto David made for me + prints from Paris Wednesday, December 11 I went to the Russian Baths on Wall Street on my first day in New York. I still go often now. It’s not really of my own volition. It’s a family tradition. It’s still pouring today. It’s been pouring all week. I used to think the Russian Baths were all liminal space and Russian mob, but now it feels less secret. The Doritos are from Israel. Russian Jews and Russian Gentiles, I hear someone explaining in line behind me. The building is huge. The pool area does feel kind of like The Backrooms. I have night terrors every night. In my dreams, I am never stuck in places like this. My aunt likes the cold plunge. She can stay in it for seven minutes, far beyond the recommended time of three. The Wim Hof method recommends rapid bursts of breath coupled with exposure to the extreme cold. I’m in the Infrared Sauna. On Christmas, I will swim outside in Walden Pond. Wim Hof (the man) lost a finger, an ear, something detached in the retina of his eye… I can’t recall the specific injury but something bad happened swimming across an icy lake. He took it too far. When I get back to New York, I will swim off Orchard Beach. There’s a group that goes every morning. My aunt tells me you have to go to Orchard Beach in the winter. It’s like Siberia in the Winter. It’s finally getting cold enough to swim. On my Wednesday at the Russian Baths, I lose my keys. I lose the big rubber slippers that they give you on arrival. I can’t last very long in the extreme heat or the extreme cold. An actor in the infrared sauna is talking about how he can only memorize lines in the cold plunge. I’m thinking about how I’m in an infinite feedback loop where everyone I meet keeps being actors. We go to dinner at the Russian Restaurant at the spa. It’s called Matryoshka like the dolls. I only learn this later David and I split potato pancakes, salad olivier which is the one with mayonnaise and egg and chicken (delicious), beef stroganoff, steamed chicken pelmeni. More stroganoff and borscht and red wine is also passed around the table. I can’t drink red wine, so I drink ginger juice and ginger vodka instead. Afterwards, too full to continue. There are other plans tonight - a film, a party, I promised I would go and I never cancel plans but sometimes I do just neglect to show up. A very bad habit. Inertia ultimately breeds pure evil! Time doesn’t pass at Spa 88. Still pouring but dark now, when we emerge from the underground. Thursday, December 12 My abridged review of Dimes Square (revival) today. I didn’t see it the first time around - I wasn’t here. I was in Boston. I was in a sorority. I arrived in this godforsaken ecosystem after it was already dead. I’m kind of being facetious. I think people try to qualify eras too concretely. Concretely: Dimes Square (the play) is indeed a period piece. In the vein of all Matthew Gasda’s plays, it is emotionally rich, lucid, kind of yearning, which catches me off guard but I think adds depth. The thing I like most about Dimes Square is this: it’s not self serious but also it is not sneering. The best satire is actually quite sincere. This is why most satire is generally and particularly in contemporary culture, bad. Dimes Square (the play) is excellent. I will be publishing a stand alone review of the play here shortly. I already wrote the review but then I realized I was far too stuck on historical accuracy and far too personally tortured. In the meantime (from my notes) -- “The main fault of the characters in the play is that they are cruel, but the main critique of this scene in real life is that it is (was?) (is?) full of people who are pathetic”
Inline links: Richard Kern, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gXs4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5a0a08cc-f0bf-4529-82bd-40b8e59712aa_4284x5363.jpeg
generative and godly secrets
May 27, 2025 · Original source
Wednesday, May 21 There were two cigarettes and two glasses of wine at Voile de Nuit. This becomes some sort of Diary of Consumption. I met Ellie at a tall house on a wooded street in the West Village where she works on things pertaining to design and then we spent the hours in the courtyard of Voile de Nuit, which I adore because it’s reminiscent of Summer and Reality. I behaved badly the last time I was here. My boyfriend comes by to drop off fries. We run into friends at Caffe Reggio and it's raining by the time we reach home. My boyfriend says: Spreading secrets is entropic Keeping your mouth shut is static Spreading misinformation is generative and godly I do think he is mostly kidding. It's Simone Weil who says about rage - “To be able to hurt others with impunity—for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent—is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make.” And I wonder which character I am in this story and it's not always the good one. I was thinking about all of that in the novel. That and the self surveillance of it all. Unfortunately, my thought experiments are ruining my life and also, the novel is ending up being All About Me LOL, too. The play tonight (Revolution at Flea Theatre ) is nice, because I walk through the rain to get there and smoke cigarettes outside The Odeon after, and because its depiction is of genuine weirdos, not like Quirked Up, not like the girls my friend texts me about after the party, “have you met them? so spacey!” not like, becoming strange because of course there is some desire to conjure up some personality and if you’re pretty then it’s fine and even appealing to be off-putting. The play is like grocery store clerk alcoholic, gun in the purse grocery store clerk alcoholic, therapy speak coping mechanisms like count up then down then up and it’s employed in the play as the coping mechanism not as an ironic tactic. Drinking beers on a birthday in the back alley and the play is disaffected from glamor in a way that I’m realizing not many things are. Like even most depictions of poverty in a lot of media, at least media coming out of New York at least certainly media surrounding youth culture and a narrative surrounding a party, goes like; we have nothing but we’re slippery adjacent to everything as a result of our charm and good looks and happenstance. The play is like, leftover charcuterie from her husband’s weird mega church and splurging at the liquor store and old cocaine shoved into a bowling ball but there’s an innocence and almost childlike wonderment to the way they tackle the expired drug situation, and the play is not about drugs. There’s a genuine kind of earnest stiltedness to the conversation that lends itself to sincerity. Thursday, May 22 May is quivering right before me; I'm not letting it lapse like April did but there are still smokescreens, silkscreens, my fingers are sleeping right through it. The Club, last night. The Play then The Club. It was smokey and sweet. My lungs felt coated in something sour by the end. The smoking patio was wet with dew and I was kind of floating, not in a bad way. Not hungover, it's something way more visceral but still hazy. I could feel it all start to slip, and so I held onto myself quite tightly. My boyfriend's screen time is 102 hours a day across devices. My face is encased in sheaths of plastic that keep you young, but they're not the temu kind that's weird and freaky. The light I use is Science Backed. I'm thinking of getting into vintage workout wear. I'm thinking of getting into Vlogging. I'm thinking of getting into filling out paid surveys online for luxury perfume sellers that require you to swear your spending habits are High and you like perfume from MiuMiu and you Hate Balenciaga and what perfume means to me is; I think sometimes scents can bring up... nostalgia? I say. Do you own a Prada dress? they ask. We leave the party early - I'm sick and he buys me chicken caesar salad pizza. Aren't you glad we left early so we could dance a little at home, he says. In the living room, the windows are all a little frosted from the rain. There are lights in the neighbors windows across the courtyard but it's thursday night, the rain has stopped. You couldn't have expected everyone to just stay home, really. I notice the people in the windows if he is spinning me across the room. Exhibitionism. I catch myself in the peripheries. The windows. The back of my mind. And I never shut the blinds but that is just no Executive Function or Detail Orientation. I am not some sort of voyeur. Friday, May 23 10:45am, and they are playing some kind of staticy electric classical mashup of music from the Fedex truck outside. "Even as a grad student, I felt they were looking down on chaos," one young man at the Yemeni coffee shop is telling another. Buying: coffee and chicken quiche but none of that is for me. Buying: peanut butter perfect bar and celsius and my boyfriend's screen time is up to 316 hours since midnight since he's doing things indiscernible to me but which he clarifies are Not Fraudulent. I am trying not to write so much in the google doc diaries. It is like I have learned these diaries as a trick, and now I am addicted to it. Now, I can’t do anything else. I must release all thoughts, but to release one thought I must go through, again and again, everything else. And so I go through it all, again and again and again. The thought, and then everything else. We were going to talk more about Spirituality today, but the tripwire keeps happening - stuck on: Vanity and Careerism. I make subheadings to keep myself in check. VANITY. CAREERISM. CAREERISM: Here is where I am: I have the substack for now which is nice this is something that I suppose in some ways is a defining thing I have done but it does not feel like so much it does not feel like it culminates to anything just proof of existence, yes, but everyone has some sort of proof of existence and it is nice to write the story behind something. The story itself cannot just be the story of writing about yourself. And for a minute I was very very very sad and so that plotline became dependable, but that is no sort of thing to rely on. And this is why it cannot all just be the writing of the self. It hasn’t been. [redacted] felt like something different, investigation, beginning middle end, it was not just here I am, it was like a puzzle it was like being very precise with it and it was the biggest thing I have done so far and I sat with it for such a long time. And perhaps I am being dramatic because there are other projects I could start in the meantime but I can’t sit down and make myself think oh what would be an interesting and pithy thing to talk about for somewhere glossy, I cannot do it. I think about doing it and my stomach rises into my throat with how little I care. And so it has to be a story that bursts out of me. There was one, and I can tell there is almost something else too but it’s like David said yes, it’s difficult while you are in the waiting room. Since beginning writing this, my fever got higher, and we are hanging the Bacchus masks around the apartment plus yellow golden softlight and, now I feel more peaceful about it. I wasn’t having so much humility. Nevermind. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 27 From 6pm (show at 7pm) at Baby’s All Right — Baby’s Presents a benefit concert for the Immigrant Defense Project with Palehound, The Ophelias, and Grumpy. Dj set by WeTakeManhattan. - “All proceeds from the show will go towards supporting the IDP’s 20+ year mission of fighting for the rights of immigrants targeted for imprisonment and mass deportation via advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.” | GA (18+) $38.86, Ticket and Bonus Donation $49.69
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QlxV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9c5eb95-81d2-4503-852b-4bdc513730dd_698x434.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0g1m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3da24e28-0d39-4802-abf2-53116dd83b00_308x392.png, Baby’s All Right, Palehound, The Ophelias, Grumpy, WeTakeManhattan
Things that Happened Once I Gave Up Vice
November 12, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, November 3 And so everything kind of begins to hover as November sweeps in. The in between weeks. One can leave the city and then one can return. I call Amelia and ask if she’d like to go on another vacation for the aim of seeking things that are transgressive and weird, but the heat and the restlessness and the Miami sun of late-may is long gone, we never did visit the falconry like we planned, everyone would probably prefer to just stay put. Boil bone broth, go to a film, seek employment, write at the gym, braid and unbraid my hair three to four times before I decide to give it a rest. Do you really hate staying put that much?, Amelia asks. I go to the West Village Bitcoin Bar past ten pm in response. Still feverish from the last few days, but the wind outside is nice and the walk along Washington Square Park is quiet, tracing the streets along the park’s West edges past the brownstones and the Washington Square Hotel and the Marlton Hotel and then Pubkey Bar. It is not so much a thing of hating to stay put, but more of feng shui, four small walls, wind and water through my open window and I think most people dislike solitude of a certain kind, which can easily be mistaken for stillness. Pubkey Bar is always lit up kind of like an arcade. They sold some sign about crypto for one million dollars here, once. They sold the president’s autograph. They made me pickletinis and diet coke and seed-oil-free nachos and I used to be kind of manic here, drunk and yelling in the wind and on the street. It is such a desperately quiet night tonight. My friends are seated in the back rooms talking softly about the most valuable parts of a whole whale, their most favorite things about the people close to them, the best sound to elicit tears, the best cherry liqueur, the best ideas for how a person should be. It all comes at me kind of underwater, anyways. It’s all felt kind of shadowy as this year writes over the year before. Tuesday, November 4 And so all the energy came swirling back in an instant. They are playing sweet music like some of the My Fair Lady and the Mad Men soundtrack and J’ai 18 Ans and Zou Bisou Bisou at the hotel lobby with the roaring fireplace and the Cecily Brown mural and the young couples wearing cream slacks and red sweaters and holding newspapers and crinkled baskets of pastries. I have loved winter in New York the most of anything these past few years, and I’d been worried this one would not hold quite the same magic. Walk through the park while it is still early. Wear mostly skirts and tights and thin strapped tops and ballet flats, all black. Order ginger turmeric tea and almond milk cappuccino and write stories by the fire. Disavow hedonism. Disavow becoming the sort of person who does the certain types of things. There’s an order to these things. I tell Amelia; it is good to be mostly quiet. It is good to go to mostly the same places a million times over if the places one chooses are good. Wednesday, November 5 Did you notice everyone became very pleased that you were becoming exactly who you were meant to be when they first put you on Adderall?“ Ellie asked me at the party last night. The night was very warm and the party was very quiet and I was pleased with myself for my relative self possession that evening, which was the goal of the fall and the winter and the days that stretched out kind of breathless. Secret-keepers and Promise-Keepers and finding equilibrium between Self-Possession and Self-Awareness. These were the vaguely worded goals of the winter. No I didn’t really find that, I told Ellie. But I never got the chance to live out my potential on stimulants because I took it too far right away. Ellie nodded with sincere interest. My friends these days were very sincere. And the party was strange because the seating was in bleachers instead of tables and the music was jazz and my friends were very well dressed, decked in corsets and ballet flats and beaded belts and hair with ribbons and holding sparkling drinks with lime and aperol and smiling very broadly. I noticed that time had been passing all along sometime in early November. and so the following fervor came spurred by the sense that something might finally happen. The air got barely perceptively colder and ghosts washed up in dreams or in my courtyard or in signs and symbols like the strange numbers I’d been seeing on the sidewalk. It had been five months to the day since the start of summer and the lurching of my life in unexpected and nefarious though perhaps ultimately necessary ways, which I suppose just goes to show that some sort of momentum was required for time to do anything aside from idly tick on. I remembered that it is just one or two or three promises I make myself and others, though it becomes one million promises if you break one promise a million times. Thursday, November 6 I did nothing in the day yesterday besides watch the clouds make shadows out of various shades of light and dusk across my walls and then I pulled on a small black dress and black Ganni crumbling boots and walked through the quiet night towards Chinatown. The air was too stale and tight inside the sports bar where my friends were all smiles and drinking water and vodka and asking me about fun and faith and so then I walked further downtown to the new wine bar on Henry Street. Here, everyone was very drunk and cast in red light and our table was set in a hallway that resembled a kindergarten classroom and an eclectic group of acquaintances I knew from the Internet or Birthday Parties or Religious Magazines were sharing bottles of wine. To sleep very little means a dream state in the gray morning, which is nice because November Ninth marks the first real distance from the summer for me. The cycles repeated. The cycles grinded to a halt. I woke up to gray morning light through my still open window with a spiral bound notebook and an idea for transcription on the blank page: THINGS THAT HAPPENED ONCE I GAVE UP VICE. Friday, November 7 Listening to Chopin Nocturne op.9 no.2 while the sound of rain mixes with the sound of the turtle pond out the window and I swim in all the visions of where I’ve heard this song before. Like twirling around on brown wood floors during summer storms in the dining room at the house by the ocean while my parents cook fish stews in the kitchen and the floors turn yellow linoleum when you approach the stove and the pouring rain outside streams through the windows and all over the counters. The memory of twirling around and the smell of rain is always the most vivid of all. Like I’m always hurdling towards something or lying very still in all my recollections of things. Obsessed with motion. Arrested by motion! So the main thing now is momentum, I suppose. My Computer keeps on queuing up Chopin the The Nutcracker and Philip Glass Mishima based on past listening habits, but these two scores are both a bit too much to bear right now and so I’m hitting Skip Skip Skip. Not too much has happened since I gave up vice yesterday. Just; Rebecca told me that I look well rested, and the story about El Salvador and network states and techno-spirituality is off to print so I will soon be able to hold it in my hands and then relinquish any narrativization of past events and, it would be nice for energy drinks and nicotine to be coursing through my veins right now but there is something more beautiful and languid in self-induced timeout over microplastics and mind altering substances. Moonless night. Moon hidden behind the rainstorm. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, November 12 From 6:30pm at Night Club 101 — Free reading series Reading 101 launches, ft Swati Sudarsan, Adrienne Raphel, Jessica Lynne, Aurora Huiza, and James Barickman. Music by Solex Yoghurt.
Inline links: Night Club 101, Reading 101
Humanoid-Robots
March 06, 2026 · Original source
Before the once-in one-hundred-years snow-storm, the air was soft and warm and not even that still, and so no one could believe what was about to come. I spent all day thinking about winter cleaning, but I did not spring into action until late. Then, I pulled on a black Gil Rodriguez dress, and I walked to buy Celsius, get on the train, drift over to downtown for a book launch, whilst feeling tired yet optimistic. Sam was sitting behind the bar next to a huge bison head and a lot of Olympic memorabilia, and he told me that Ellie was there and New-York-University girls were there and not Saiorse, yet, who is terminally late. Downstairs, the lounge was open and dark and I mixed myself a drink full of Campari syrup and ginger and gin. I went upstairs and I sat at the bar and Sam made me a Roy Rogers which is a Shirley Temple but for boys. Saiorse arrived in a gray dress and boots, and she made me a glass of melon juice. Lily arrived, and she told Sam that she only drinks diet coke. After that, we walked over through the still warm enough night to a penthouse party full of people who make robots. This, or a dive-bar. This, or Soho House. This or homeward bound. Choose your own adventure. Humanoid robots are designed to do physical things that humans do like serve food at restaurants, and to potentially also have superior intellect and perhaps become agentic-not-mimetic, Saiorse explained. She explained something of a sort of space-race to get this show-on-the-road. Cold War. I was thinking more in hypotheticals. I hadn’t really been invited. I have not had existential dread since summer, when I moved out of a glass apartment where I was always staring up at terminally blinking skies. I only ever said I was a nihilist when I didn’t know what that word meant. At the party, there were trays and trays of sushi and a spiral staircase and men carrying around platters of dumplings. Everyone from the Stanford class of twenty-two is here, Sam said. A lot of people flew in for this party, he explained. Saiorse and I maneuvered our way to the bar, and then towards a long counter top that appeared to be a buffet, but was totally untouched. Lily and Saoirse and I began to eat everything on display. Grabbing plates of salmon and being greedy. A girl standing in the center of the room was saying she felt dizzy. Does anyone else feel dizzy, she was asking. Yes, I decided. Yes indeed I do, and so I went to the bathroom but the door was just one big plywood sheath with no lock, and the music that was fired up throughout the whole huge vast apartment was pumping out from two small speakers that were located here. Blaring Ye so loudly from out of the bathroom ceiling and from under the sink. It felt kind of like a strange and architectural dream. Not like a bad dream, but like I had to go. The girl in the center of the room had reminded me that I was feeling dizzy. She disappeared by the time I came back to the party, and I tried to tell my friends about the strange and blaring bathroom music but they were absorbed in things that seemed hyper and happy and totally present. Nobody seemed too future-oriented despite the product at hand, but they never do at these sorts of things. The books on display all had colorful spines and recognizable titles. I did say goodbye, and outside, the snow had still not started.

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