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Sylvie

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Sylvie

Article

Sylvie is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 15, 2025 and September 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I text Sylvie and Rebecca about the project idea”; “a plan to celebrate sweet Sylvie’s birthday”; “to celebrate sweet Sylvie’s birthday”. It most often appears alongside Brittany Menjivar, Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Coney Island.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 15, 2025
  • Last seen: September 09, 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.

[REDACTED] is awful
April 15, 2025 · Original source
Tuesday, April 8 I had too many yuca fries before the beef stew dinner last night and so I wasn’t too hungry, went to bed early, didn't sleep a wink and now it's dawn. We eat dinner at Ritual most nights in Malpais. Ritual is the cafe that David’s friend's girlfriend owns. It is full of wonderful things like a tart made of avocados and cashews and coconut oil, or espresso mixed with orange juice, or, last night was stew from the meat we grilled over the weekend, and last night the restaurant was closed, just accessible for us, I went to bed too early. Fog at sunrise today. I pack up and I tiptoe out of the hotel. David finds me by the horses in the morning dew making scratch marks on paper. I tell him that I don't take any of it for granted, and I mean it when I say it. I get in a taxi, and then I am by myself again. At the airport, I am too tired to even be on edge. I text Sylvie and Rebecca about the project idea that is sure to be a hit. Do you want to be a part of [new hit project] I say. Yes, they both say. At the airport, I kind of want to go slump over in a booth, and so I go and sit inside an awful place called GastroPub and I order one of those awful salads with the canned black olives and the dried mushrooms and cranberries and shaved almonds and some generic seed oil filled dressing, you know the type. I order a black coffee, too. The seed oil dressing on the side comes dangerously close to sloshing all over my coffee. I pick the chicken out of my salad with some care and eat only that, while the rest of the whole soggy heap of food kind of collapses in on itself. I spend twenty one dollars. Then, I spend nineteen dollars on some coffee and electrolytes and macaroons from Starbucks. I make sure to time my macaron consumption to end at twelve noon exactly, and then I set a timer for 36 Hours. A Monk Fast. This is the sort of thing that can be done when one is at the airport feeling bogged down. Obviously, I am not actually going to join a cult. It's mostly just aesthetic fixation. Style over substance. The real issue intellectually is if you can't truly distinguish yourself from something like the plastic tray on the plane in front of you. I haven't even really tried too hard to find a God. I'm sorry. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, April 15 From 8pm - late at (RSVP for location) — Terms Eccles is throwing another tax day party!! - “talking broadly about money and art and downtown and midtown, all at once. the only thing that will make tax day worth celebrating.”
Inline links: Terms Eccles
Drinking Dreams
September 04, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, August 24 Lay with filthy tangled hair hanging off the edge of the roof for a while last night, watching the Chase Clock Tower lit up too royal blue and the Empire State Building lit up the nicer sort of baby blue. I've been collecting shades of blue. Kind of navy blue Frankie's Bikini little number reflecting something sort of aqua off my Diet Pepsi on the D-line towards Coney Island. Screaming children on the D-line. Naked man running around trying to steal pedestrians pants on Coney Island. He keeps on saying to the other guy, Darby says - “I like those pants ! Gimme those pants!” And it was all these beautiful friends coming and going last night. Coming and going until it was late, really late, so taxi home and then I ate the toppings off a slice of pizza on the floor with a spoon. I spent the morning alone doing Rituals. Tretinoin before sleep and I did wake up screaming for the first time in a while. Red light therapy and copper multi peptides and avocado eye cream and mineral sunscreen and now I'm on the Subway. Kind of braindead on the subway. It sometimes takes it out of you. This sort of thing can really take it out of you. It's been summer for forever, now. I have a lot more friends now. Connectivity, connected tissue, I walk down Brighton Beach by myself, walk to Tashkent Supermarket for a towel and carrot salad and on the phone I'm saying it is not that I wish for death and even sometimes I fear it but things have become a lot less Risk Averse. I'm a lot less Risk Averse now. It would be better to be dead, someone was saying at the bar last night. She was looking at me eyes all intense and no one was really listening, I could tell no one was really listening but everyone was watching her all the same and I could see them all clenching their bodies and kind of pulling away.. Me particularly, pulling away. Perhaps I'm being self absorbed. It wouldn't be better to be dead, someone else said. He looked at me then, locked eyes which usually makes me kind of uncomfortable but I felt inclined to agree. It's definitely better when nobody is dead, I said. The bar was full of plants and glass. Like a glass jungle, I told my nameless friends at the bar.. That's not very astute, a nameless friend told me. Tonight, the cocktail menu is flavored and priced like a full course meal, and so tonight I order Cold Pizza for dinner. Cold Pizza in a crisp glass bottle, plus greasy fried chicken after that, which comes in thick paper cups. And everyone is so grateful to be alive, tonight. Everyone is so grateful for one more year of life for themselves and for their dear friends particularly. Purple sunrise if I hadn't slept through it. Yellow sunset if I hadn't gritted my teeth and clenched my eyes shut through it. Planted two feet firmly in the ground and screamed through it. First, I made one thousand promises I couldn't keep. Second, I sat on the stoop with an energy drink, water, cool minty menthol gum and the antiseptic kind of sore throat with some bodega spray gripped tight in my hand to heal all my problems. My ailments and the other things. My organs and my mind. Overjoyed to be alive again after leaving my apartment, I told Amelia. It does make things better again, Amelia told me. Tuesday, August 25 Bartending school feels kind of like an alcoholic's vision of a drinking dream. Like holograms of condensation, dim lighting, one takes a sip to the tune of disappointment. Water and food coloring dye. Bowery Park and Whole Foods and JPress nearby and inside; Christmas is coming. Smooth jazz. Everything has felt a bit the same for a time, but my room is clean. Summer is passing. Three months is not so long. Would a functional alcoholic lace up black ankle boots at seven in the morning with a clear mind and bright eyes to catch the train towards midtown towards Bartending School, at the top of the week, at the tail end of August? I am not so good at pretending like anything is changing. Like habits stack towards something greater. It might as well be yesterday, I sigh on the phone. For you, it might as well be yesterday, Amelia agrees. I do the things a person should. Cake for friends' birthdays and the waiter keeps stacking on fees at Union Square Cafe. Cut the cake fee, sit at the table fee, big group of people fee, bring your own food fee. There are other tables next to us all inhabited by people who all appear to be exactly the same, though perhaps I am being uncharitable. Imagine them as skeletons. Imagine them as children. My parents used to tell me this when I was little. Kind of a hack against boredom. I imagine myself as a psychic, looking out on things overpriced and people all exactly the same. You will have a small child and feed her nothing but buttered noodles. You will advance in age but stay exactly the same through invasive surgical facial intervention and stunted social development. You will spend evenings eating french fries with caviar for One Hundred Dollars despite a rich inner world and a childhood pumped full of extracurricular stimulation designed, specifically, to avoid a fate like this. You will fear God more than death and you will understand self destruction to be akin to suicide hence rendering you too, on a trajectory like this, a rather hellish creature. You will wake up in the middle of the night in a small box criss-crossed wood roof apartment in New York City to the sense that there are No Loopholes Left. You will go to bartending school. You will recognize that, while you can be cruel there were other factors at play. There were worse factors at play. Wednesday, August 26 Walking from Greenwich Village to Long Meadow in Prospect Park with a bag filled up with white linen and Thomas Pynchon and a plan to celebrate sweet Sylvie's birthday. A different sort of nostalgia in the air today. Nostalgia of all sorts being kind of a form of mental illness, of course but once - we were woodland fairies. Once, there were fall morning running races and cranberries that crunched under bare feet on Massachusetts roads. Once, there were rounds of Tom Collins in a kind of jazzy jungle garden restaurant in the tropics that my boyfriend who liked gender-roles enjoyed because they wouldn't let girls order their own drinks. Once, I went to the Yankees game in late August, blue and pink hazy skies, the sort of advertisements that blare out notes about Fast Food and Safe Driving in the stadium, and the sort of crowd that is so big it starts inspiring feelings of Life and Spirit rather than Homogoninity and Dread. Once, I walked from bartending school full of Tom Collins, Chambord, a sip of walnut martinini, frangelico liquor. Walked to Caffe Reggio for egg white omelet, toast, a creamy cannoli. Walking to Prospect Park a little bit tipsy. Thinking about the sort of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing about the sorts of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing it all down. Writing and walking. Writing it everywhere. Writing it on the walls. Though, I'm not so bad at keeping secrets anymore. Thursday, August 27 Amelia and I sat at Caffe Reggio until close last night, and now I have returned. Tomato soup and side grilled chicken and creamy cannoli and mint tea because things feel decadent again. Limited consumption. I haven’t really been limiting consumption. The waitress is complimenting the gray sweatpants on the boys at the table over from me, and the waitress seems to be vaguely annoyed with me, though I am trying to be pleasant. Thanks the sweatpants cost enough, the boys are saying, at the table over. Thanks we didn't realize we couldn't split the bill, Amelia and I were saying, last night, our tea was four dollars total and everything was starting to feel a little bit hazy. Sitting on the floor at sunrise, this morning, Amelia and I were watching videos from Miami. Videos from Bahamas. Videos from New York City, 2022, we'd been at all the same parties, but I hadn't known a soul. BAHAMAS, we are beaming, in one video, in the back of a taxi cab, streaking over MacArthur Causeway, Miami-Dade County, Florida, and so, as I recall, the driver was confused. I'm putting on makeup in the photo booth webcam on the floor of a hotel room and Amelia is talking in the background. It's Opposite Day in the background. Who had a mental breakdown, someone is saying in the background. From an outsider's perspective, who was it who had a mental breakdown? Friday, August 28 6:30pm, and I am back at IFC for my third viewing of Diva (1981) in twenty-four hours. I came to view Diva (1981) for the third time in twenty-four hours, because I became very sick of thinking about myself. This is a desirable alternative. The film is beautiful, and I wish to live in places like the apartments pictured. A large and wrecked studio in a car park with painted walls and recording equipment or, a hotel in Paris or, a castle by the sea or, the best one of all is a large blue flat full of puzzles and high ceilings and echoing sea sounds and an aqua glow and a man who wants to learn to stop the waves. They are fighting crime in the film. They are entrapping the criminals and they are doing it kind of like performance art. I don’t wish to spoil the ending. It really is the perfect little film. So; I will send out the recipe for zucchini (courgette) soup, and I will explain away the things I did in breathless optimism as things I did while bored. I will go to The Scratcher, Killarney Rose, Funny Bar, then Gospel then Caffe Reggio again - these are the decadent places to which I continue to return. I will draw my name with Riley on the table in crayon writing Best Friends Forever and listen to Feryquitous ft Sennzai and Sigur Rós and John Maus and think about Switzerland, Iceland, having a lot of dreams about places that are lush, lush, lush. Thinking about places that are quiet quiet quiet. Thinking about places that are green green green. Feels like Fall, outside, after church. Amelia woke me up in a living room that looked like a library and she was screaming that the air was poison. I was difficult to awaken, because it is my own delusions of poison air that wake me up screaming on other nights. Different from tonight. I was reminding myself of reality. I was reminding myself of delusions and keeping my eyes clenched shut while Amelia screamed. Well, the air wasn’t poison after all, just late night and late august and heavy with mosquitos and dust from renovations and revelations and; we walked back to the cafe. I walked through Washington Square Park at dawn. The doorman wished me good night at seven in the morning and the cycles repeated. It isn’t opposite day and we aren’t in hell, just working on things like bed time and emotional regulation. Working on archiving the things that happen outside of my head. It becomes good to have been an archivist all along. It becomes good to become sick of dealing with things mainly in repetition. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, September 4 From 6pm at Carinito — Saloon is throwing a party. Drinks from Dio. Dancing, DJ, tacos, etc
Inline links: Carinito, Saloon, throwing a party
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

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