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Albany

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Albany

Article

Albany is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 25, 2025 and February 25, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I was in a too small airbnb outside Albany New York”; “they’d lost the crew somewhere around Albany”; “cutting on the trains toward Albany”. It most often appears alongside Night Club 101, Celia, David Fishkind.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 25, 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.

How to Redeem Yourself
March 25, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, March 15 When I have a tablespoon of manuka honey with a sprinkle of sea salt before bed, I wake up feeling electric. My whole body is pulsing. It’s like a chemical reaction, almost. Very strange. When I record my letters like it’s a podcast or something, sitting at the marble kitchen table in my empty foggy living room, the recordings process and save like I am somewhere else. A restaurant nearby, maybe. The files label themselves. Finest Goods #1, Finest Goods #2, Finest Goods #9, Finest Goods #12. I do feel quite stupid, doing all of this. I’m sorry to speak like this. I’m sorry to be late or even absent, again. Long Island, Saint Patrick’s Day, my mom and my aunt and my cousins have me for dinner uptown and so I claw myself out of the apartment for this evening occasion. The health stuff is starting to feel more under control, thank god. It was starting to freak me out at the play last night. “There is no physical illness without mental connection, conceptualization, perception,” it was one of those words. Madelyn reminded me. I’m fine, really. I bought cold pressed rosehip oil and I bought multi-peptides + copper peptides. I bought four pints of ice cream to bring to the dinner tonight. I bought pink Kate Spade ballet flats and black Marc Jacobs riding boots and black manolo blahnik ballet flats, too, for soooo cheap vintage, but then when they arrived at my door, within minutes of arriving at my door, someone stole them! I am mostly upset because these things were a real splurge. I am also upset, because these things were one of a kind. Honestly, I am less upset about the one of a kind part. I am not too precious when it comes to things of fashion. The play last night was great. Matthew Gasda’s Uncle Vanya on Huron Street. Uncle Vanya at ArtX, because the water on Huron Street was shut off for the week. Admittedly, I never saw Uncle Vanya at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research in its original run, but I was glad to see it in this bigger space, here - the insularity and the claustrophobia and the suffocating sense of everybody speaking and nobody being heard given ever-so-slightly more air in this room of high ceilings than in a living room loft. November - I was in a too small airbnb outside Albany New York and I almost punched a hole in the glass window. There was too much gray sleet, and no escape. I did not break the window, but I was somewhat awestruck by the potential for violence elicited by even the early aughts of claustrophobia. Which is to say, this is a bit of how I felt while watching Vanya. Dimes Square was insular, but the characters kind of love it. Vanya is insular, and there is literally no escape. What happens when you cannot leave, when there is nowhere to go, when the path lays itself bare at your feet and the options are bleak? It is not a hopeful story, though not nihilistic really, either. George Olesky is brilliant as The Doctor, Bob Laine as a kind of hapless Vanya, Asli Mumtas as the beautiful and listless Yelena, Mia Vallet as Sonya, half bursting with youthful vigor and potential, and then veering into a nearly manic and finally resigned pitch, as it becomes clear there will be no actualization. No salvation, either. I have thought before that desperation reeks, but this play suggests instead, that it festers. The characters who can leave, do. Those who must stay, are forced to find something else. What that something is remains a bit ambiguous. Integrity, perhaps. Hope in death and in God. Monday, March 16 I entered into all this fugue state psychosis yesterday. The guy my friends ran into at the bar yesterday entered into all this unrequited love psychosis. People can be so evil. That’s the last thing I texted my boyfriend before I basically blacked out on Saturday: people can be so evil. In my glass house, it was pouring pouring pouring rain last night. I felt so nostalgic for that apartment last night, even as it still remains mine, now. I felt like I could suddenly remember what it was for this apartment to be all new. There was no clutter last June. There was a sudden arrival in a place that was suddenly mine. It was freshly cleaned and there was all this space, it was like infinity it was like, all this light, oh my god, all this air and light and space, this will never get old. My mother says that about the fields behind the house sometimes: I moved in and I wondered if it would ever get old and it never did, she says. But she’s been there twenty-five years. humid summer air and thrifted propped up fans still blowing hot air through the white wood corridors on august mornings. I’ve been here nine months and I am already starting to stagnate. Which I guess is to say: I’m spoiled or, maybe I’m boring. Last night, I was nothing but happy. Tuesday, March 17 How to redeem yourself? Wednesday, March 18 Places this week: Cafe Reggio, The Public Library, Elizabeth Street Garden, Lucien for drinks, Fanelli Cafe for dinner. My roof every morning and night because it is spring now. Spring again. Spring at last. Thursday, March 19 And something gives in a permanent way. New practices, new routines, you cannot continue like this, and so you wake up one day and you don't. There has been a lot that has been beautiful and then, there has been me taking myself out of all this beauty. And you don't become so didactic and harsh and full empty promises. You just give yourself some willpower and then you give yourself some peace. I'm feeling really really really really annoyed on the plane to El Salvador. I'm sorry. This part isn't supposed to be in the story. I will tell you the real story, soon. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, March 25 From 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport — Jamie Hood presents her new memoir Trauma Plot, in conversation with Rayne Risher-Quann.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pGk7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F121e430b-e68e-404a-8963-27f700eb191f_1286x832.png, presents her new memoir
Florida, Massachusetts (03)
December 02, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday 7:45am and I am lying very still in my clean crisp bed like it’s a haven or a ship that will float me above and away from the clutter around me. Lying with my head pulled under white bamboo sheets, so I don’t have to see anything other than white noise and whatever I decide to fire up on my phone all around me. Reading Girl Insides live blogging her breakup on my phone this morning, and I do feel envious of the corporeal and anonymous ways in which her brand of compulsive documentation flows. Feeling kind of vague and emotionless after a weekend that was here there everywhere, and I let myself really be sucked into it which is always how it goes but one needs to be careful. I wore Cinq-a-Sept Christmas dress for a few days in a row, and there was dinner in a dark wood uptown apartment and there was a sunrise over the Hudson River and I kind of don’t want to write it like a sequence of events. I kind of hope to talk about the architectures of things and why they happen as they do. On my phone, Girl Insides is in Hollywood and breathing in jasmine and perfect fog and smog and panzanella crackers. All of a sudden everything that happens in my life is up to me, Girl Insides says. Well, me too for the first-time-ever, but it becomes more difficult this way. Perhaps I’ll go to surf in San Diego with Emma. Perhaps I’ll go to Kazakhstan or Tbilisi, Georgia or at least commit myself to no more losing days following wherever the wind blows me. I’ll be in Florida, Massachusetts, anyways this week. A spooky little town. They cursed the Amtrak towards Western, Massachusetts last year. Strangers yelling at me as we sat in dark seats hurdling through the night with train snacks of hot dog and coca cola and chips that came in perfect little packages that one unboxes in the dining car. A girl threw herself at the walls of the train on the platform as it pulled out of Moynihan Station. She bounced off the train and was removed unscathed. The conductor announced that they’d lost the crew somewhere around Albany. I walked into a doctors office and I recognized the dermatologist’s twisted and frozen face as the woman who’d been screaming on a night train heading out of New York. And all of this is just to say that everything was kind of cursed and still is sometimes, but I am trying to find omens in the more beautiful and serendipitous sorts of patterns and symbols and signs. In the hotel lobby, Celia told me to be less vague about it. Either say what you mean or don’t. So I do believe everything that I have ever been told. Which is mostly just to say that before I believed everything bad, I believed everything good. Tuesday We drove from New York to The Berkshires this morning. I stopped at Broadway Bagels and then at a farmstand and now we are here. So, these are the things that have happened. No curses and no omens. The house we can see outside the long glass window got painted green and now it totally fades into the woods. That’s nice, everyone says. That’s so much nicer, now. It’s brilliant blue-gray outside the long glass windows now that the snow has stopped and it is settling into very early afternoon dusk. I am lying by the fire that is crackling louder when the furnace is on and quieter when it isn’t. The Eames chair is empty behind me and the lamps overhead are big yellow orbs, hanging from the slanted wooden ceilings. There are things I could do here. Mass MoCA museum and my favorite James Turrell works there that change with morning and evening light. Or, The Clarke Art Museum and I can hear whispers of a textile show that others are bundling up to go see downstairs, but I think I would prefer to just stay put. There is a Tourists Hotel by the North Adams airport, which is a motel that turned fancy, with individual bungalows looking out at the river and a restaurant that looks like a home inside, all fireplaces and craft drinks and lots of little rooms. There is the alpaca farm up the road and there is Hopkins Forest and Pine Cobble and the Appalachian Trail and the sauna room by the river and trees like skeletons waving in the fading daylight just past my peripheral vision. I drove to Graylock Works when we got here to do ballet and yoga in an old mill and then I drove to the gas station and then to the local hotel lobby where I sat incognito for a moment watching families in autumn dresses and long jackets filter in and out and in and out and then I drove home. I’ve been here for a while. It’s nice to find a house that I can float through. It’s nice that when I look around I see something aside from four small walls. A blizzard just began. It is strange, because the snow is flying horizontally in the Southbound wind, but the trees suddenly appear to be standing perfectly still. Wednesday Field Notes from Florida, Massachusetts and my Google Docs Diary: I woke up this morning and I cleansed my face and put on toner and then guasha with rose oil and then red light therapy while stretching.
Inline links: Girl Insides
Life-in-a-lab
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Tuesday Life-in-a-lab In my dream, the house was a lab. I woke up to light not just streaming no, but flooding, absolutely pouring through the long glass windows in front of me. I knew that once the light cleared, I would be staring into the heart of this lab. I knew it was a problem that I was anticipating waking up in a lab, because I knew that I should have been anticipating a morning waking up at home. Instead, I was finding myself totally nonplused about waking up in a lab. The important thing, I knew, as I woke up with a sense of increasing urgency, was to conjure up an image of a home, not a lab. You have been in a lab for so long that you have forgotten about home, a very confident voice inside my head was saying. A picture of my childhood bedroom appeared in a few frames. Different versions. Big white bed and blue wooden floors and presently frosty fields behind the house. Little twin bed yellow walls, carpeted floors, and hot summer cornfields outside. I couldn’t get it straight. If I was in a lab, then I needed to remember. You need to remember a place that actually exists, the lab-attendants were saying in my dream. Saying in my head. Glass apartment in the sky. Room at The Marlton Hotel. I’ve been eating vegetables and collecting things like dried flowers and books on Esoteric Health and buying wash-and-fold laundry service and being swept away to places like nice restaurants with no menus and nice-apartments-with-no-owners. I woke up in Connecticut. Can’t wake up in a lab if you never go to sleep. In the morning, I woke up at close to noon. I shared photos on The Internet of a very aesthetically-cohesive and un-lab-like home. I went to the bathroom to wash my face and collect myself as best I could. The house was beautiful, and I was unsure as to why I was watching things unfold from as if I was somewhere else. I made lists of things that were special, being places like this most of all. I made lists of things that compose self respect, and then I made lists of things that compose a life that is bright and white and full of light. The country is quiet and sometimes difficult for me, though I sleep through the night now and this changes everything. Downstairs, the dogs and Celia and the other were sitting under high lofted ceilings. There was a magical and silvery presence that mediation gives to a person. I asked about coffee and they told me there was coffee in the pot and I could heat it up in a silver bowl on the stove. The stove was green and handmade and you turned it on by flicking little metal burner switches. The bowl was nice and very small. I poured the coffee in the bowl and I waited for everything to begin to boil. I added vital proteins collagen and also oat milk creamer and also lots of white sugar because the esoteric health advice of the age says this is fine. There were homemade mini muffins from The Smith Bakery down the street on the counter (blueberry, morning harvest, strawberry corn, and chocolate chip) and so I cut each muffin in half, and then I had one-half-of-each. Two mini muffins total. I put two of the halves in the toaster, and I had two of the halves cold. Everyone started telling me about gnosticism and buddhism and catholicism. They recommended to me a friend who writes about God and married into a famous band. They recommended I come to meditate in places like New York, too. You look ready, Celia said, as I packed up my north face back-pack and changed out of split-sweatpants and banaa-republic-black-top. I’m not, I snapped, in response. Do you actually want to meditate more, Celia asked. I don’t say I want to do things I don’t actually want to do, I replied. I could not stop with all this harshness. Wednesday Grand Central Station Back in New York City and I am totally covered in dog hair. Shoes untied in Grand Central Station but there is nowhere for me to stop and tie them without risking some sort of stampede or at least massive inconvenience and so onward we go. A man just walked towards me rapidly and I flinched and then felt kind of bad. Then, he shouted; young lady can I ask you a question and so now I do not feel bad. My instincts were correct, and now I do not feel bad at all. Ok, fine, whatever. I used to love arriving back in New York and hearing all the music and the lights and I would twirl through this place nonpulsed. Then, I would twirl home. I used to get drunk-before-christmas at the midtown Cipriani and then giggle when people called my ex-boyfriend and I bad-people-for-cutting on the trains toward Albany, but I’m not allowed to move like that anymore. I used to sink into sixty-dollar taxi-cabs because I found the subway over-stimulating. My Prada purse used to be lined with shiny leather, but I got fidgety somewhere tropical and I ripped it all off so now we’re working with something more flattened and matte. Teenage girls used to fling themselves at the side of the train platforms, and conductors used to lose their whole crew in Boston and train heists used to happen. I used to consider everything to be pretty taken-care-of. I think I never used to notice when sometimes, problems would arise. On the train ride back to New York, tonight, the tracks were icy and slick and it was already kind of blue hour dusk. When I said goodbye, I told Celia I love you I love you I love you a million times over because I felt slightly neurotic about a weekend full of being slightly late and slightly harsh. I am smart enough to know that the only thing complaining makes you better at is complaining, so I decided to stop. In Grand Central Station, they are playing live music, and I watch a man propose, though no one else around the soon-to-be newlyweds reacted. No photos or energy. Sad. I am wearing beat up Ganni knee high boots and Brandy Melville long sleeved dress, and Zara blazer that I stole from Paul’s Baby Grande back when I was in the practice of going lots of places and stealing lots of things. I miss my Max Mara coat that I left at “tech week” and I miss “drinking” and I am suddenly desperate to be out the door. I imagine that when the subway doors fly open and I burst out free and all-in-one piece, I will see the Washington Square Park arch, and it will be glowing silver in mid-winter light. I imagine that the city will feel warm with soon-to-be-spring-humidity. I imagine that since groundhog day has come and gone the tides will change soon, and I imagine I will relinquish my Groundhog Day (1993) fantasies of nothing-ever-happens at some point down the line, when it all becomes a bit too much to take. Tomorrow, I will be taking my shoes to the tailor and then the next day, I will have a totally fresh new crop of things to wear. I imagine that soon, I will have a fresh new crop of things to consider. Thursday Whore Dialectics Greenwich Village’s bitcoin bar sports a libertarian clientele and taxidermy and a podcast studio and beef-tallow-fries. Tonight, it sports a projector screen from my old apartment that looks sad and small propped on stage, and a big audience in metal chairs, and a birthday party in the front room, and plenty of opportunities to make myself feel useful as I tinker with film equipment and fire off texts regarding “promotional material.” I am sitting at Pubkey Bar drinking a diet coke while I wait for the screening of “Whore Dialects” to begin. When I ordered my diet coke at the bar, a strange man made a strange joke about NA beer, and I felt immediately irritated and restrained by my self imposed limits. I am listening to a group of young men discuss the career path of “Internet Pervert” as one of the only viable post-AI jobs. Monetize your self destruction, they are saying. Male prostitution. Buying plushies is to women as buying porn is to men. There’s a strange pseudo-intellectual glare to it all and I am enjoying listening in. They are talking about Brian Kaplan, but they keep on mispronouncing his name. They are talking about scientists, rationalists, and flexible proposals. When they talk about Internet Perverts, there are stars in their eyes, less because of the sex, it seems, and more because the internet perverts are able to get some money and get some attention. The male influencer. That seems to be what they are starry eyed about. They are thrilled to be in the same extended universe as someone who might be able to garner some vague attention. This is a bar that usually makes me feel kind of hazy. This is a bar where I used to make scenes. Enough reminiscing, because I am here to watch a film that is all about auto-documentarians, which is in sharp contrast to the maladjusted forms of auto-diary or auto-fiction. In the film, a beautiful girl is in the back of a car with the wind in her face and she is drinking an Erewhon smoothie and talking about how Hollywood is dead and the monasteries are empty and you can’t be a nun or get a phd because you question what truth is, and these institutions just won’t let you get at it. After that, the film cuts to a scene where the girl is in a white dress being play-drowned in the ocean by a right-wing provocateur. The film crew sent the provocateur to stay with the girl, and it was kind of the perfect setup, a voiceover explains. The provocateur describes how when he arrived, the girl was in a state of almost total abjection. Like how kids who are sexually assaulted don’t shower to make themselves totally disgusting and unappealing, he explains. I find the provocateur slightly less interesting as a character than both the girl, and the disgraced art-advisor (another prominent character in the film) but I like when he argues about politics and then reconciles on a personal level with those around him in places like California. I like the scenes about the professionally fraught yet personally friendly relationship between the art advisor and his not terribly successful clients, ie the clients are disappointed but still use the advisor’s pool for summer swims. The client still dreams of having an eighteen person studio because this means tremendous success, and because this is just how men dream. When the provocateur is described but not depicted as losing control, it is explained that the jig is kind of up, because it’s no triumph of power to reign over somebody who is not even in control of themselves. I only watch the film once and I am not taking notes, really, during the public screening at the Bitcoin Bar, but I like it because it is auto-documentary not auto-fiction or auto-diary and as such, it is very precise. The film says, for someone like me in the conditions like the ones I occupy, here is what life is like. This is more matter of fact and less indulgent than saying; here is what life is like for me. At a party last month that was also all about art whores, the filmmakers wrote a few lines about a few of my friends. The women present were on average quite a bit younger than the men and looked fresh. Perhaps because of their age, or perhaps because of the care they put into their bodies and minds, but the vibe among the women was optimistic and exuberant. I thought this was nice. Nice, too, to catch purity in unexpected places while staying totally true. Friday Upper West Side Later, I am uptown and I am thinking about how I can become more self-disciplined so I can become more interesting. I am watching Pierre Le Fou at Lillian’s apartment on the Upper West Side and all the girls are dressed like characters in the film. Lilian keeps leaning out the window with a long skinny cigarette and I am drinking a glass of Sancerre because I just can’t quit. In this film, a very small man is holding a gun to a very beautiful girl’s head while she cuts her hair. The beautiful girl has a brunette bob, and she is wearing a red dress. The film is full of primary colors and very bright paint. When a man is stabbed, he bleeds red paint. Before a man explodes himself in dynamite at the end of the film, he paints himself blue. I like the film because the colors of the gore are all bright and fake like paint, and the colors of the scenery are all pastel and muted and lovely like real life. Summer in The Riviera. Beautiful people living a simple and crime-filled life. I have not watched very many films this year because I’ve been busy writing thirty-thousand-words-about-myself-per-week. In the last film I watched, a Japanese cat was exploded by a grenade, and when gore and guts spilled everywhere, I flinched and clenched my eyes shut. Do you want to leave, my friend asked, and what I wanted was to be resilient, but what I said was I don’t really care. Now, a girl in the film is sitting on a boat with a man, and she is talking about how the two have only known each other for a few million seconds. She’s such a stupid girl, Lillian says. I would say something like that, I respond. One-million-billion-seconds and one-million-billion-words. I am feeling bubbly when I am not feeling sick or shy. I am feeling like it’s time to be more light about it. When I look to my left, I see beautiful stained glass lamps and a defense surveillance tech-branded throw blanket. When I look to my right, I see an open window and all my friends leaning too far outside smoking skinny vogues. On the Internet, people are talking about how things are only interesting if they are true. Determinative reasoning then says, one should make what is true more interesting. Everything just became crystal clear. By which I mean, everything is operating on material terms now. DIRECTORY The full event calendar is now going to live on The Aleph - an exciting new platform by Noah Kumin of The Mars Review of Books. The Aleph is a marketplace and membership club for the arts, with an emphasis on supporting in-person events, production, and funding for artists. Programming featured will be intentional and curated, and include more opportunities for early-access and invitation-only events. If you would like to submit an event for consideration, please email me at chloegpingeon@gmail.com. Apply to join The Aleph here I will still be featuring select events on the blog, along with more eclectic or personal recommendations, news, and guest features. To start: David Rimanelli is perhaps my favorite person to follow on Instagram, as well as one of my favorite critics. Tonight, from 6:30pm at Tibet House, he will be reading, along with Kiely Sweatt and Sean Fabi. Tickets here.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1h49!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd95f9aef-d112-4dd9-a0fb-1610ba693067_1536x2048.jpeg, The Aleph, chloegpingeon@gmail.com, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!m6hb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5452bedc-f504-4cc0-a6f3-349820bdb9a3_1156x1138.png, David Rimanelli, here

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