East River
Article
East River is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 06, 2024 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “a plague of locusts that descended on the East River”; “down to where the East River runs near the Lower East Side”; “We go for a walk along the East River”. It most often appears alongside New York, TJ Byrnes, Anika Jade Levy.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: June 06, 2024
- Last seen: October 13, 2025
Appears In
- [[issues/2024-06-06_collected-agenda-3_full|COLLECTED AGENDA #3]]
- Live Diary.
- Big Huge World
- Void of Course
Related Pages
-
- New York (3 shared issues)
-
- TJ Byrnes (3 shared issues)
-
- Anika Jade Levy (2 shared issues)
-
- Beckett Rosset (2 shared issues)
-
- Blade Study (2 shared issues)
-
- Celia (2 shared issues)
-
- Celsius (2 shared issues)
-
- Dimes Square (2 shared issues)
-
- El Salvador (2 shared issues)
-
- Iris (2 shared issues)
-
- Ivy Wolk (2 shared issues)
-
- Jean’s (2 shared issues)
External Links
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.
I’m making every effort to walk to the MuuMuu House Dasha Tao Lin Writers Life Tips reading on time, but I arrive at 7:01pm and I already can’t get in the door. I’m standing on the street for a while while my sister goes to Casetta and my friends arrive. Smoking - one cigarette, drinking: nothing, until someone offers me water because I am looking depleted. The sky is all orange because it’s sunset but lots of cloud cover. It’s the best sky color in the world, someone is saying. Remember when the whole day turned orange from the forest fires last summer, someone else is saying. I remember the bright orange sky obviously, and also that there was a plague of locusts that descended on the East River, and that Shannon and I had to run from the Brooklyn Bridge through a storm of gnats and thick red air before ducking somewhat unwelcome into Swan Room.
Monday, April 1 My mind was reeling so fast in my Irish Literature class this evening. I started flicking through Internet Web Applications at warpspeed. I made some calls. I didn’t go crazy. “Saying no is a far more reliable path to avoiding sin than saying yes”, I heard someone say, through my fog, through the haze - that snapped me out of it quite quickly. “What if you literalize that, and just say no to everything?” a quiet girl across from me asked. I wrote this part down - “JUST SAY NO TO EVERYTHING!!!!” It was humid, heavy, soon-to-be-hot spring, today, in New York. I lost my head. Truly. I became very braindead very quickly, today. I recovered as best I could. It’s the way these things always go. Unmoored from the interactions you’ve been taking for granted, you’ve been alone with your thoughts and suddenly, you’ve found yourself thinking Nothing At All, and Saying A Lot Out Loud And Saying A Lot Online. You realize, suddenly, how wrong this all is, and then you become briefly concerned that maybe, suddenly, it is already too late for you. Or maybe it isn’t too late after all.. Water on the windowsill. I remember spring two years ago, a taxi cab from Chelsea down to where the East River runs near the Lower East Side. I wore a yellow dress and I ran like the wind from the river to the hotel bar. The fires. The maggots. It was that day in New York when it felt like cosmically, biblically, something bad was probably about to happen. The Seven Plagues. The air was thicker and hotter, then. I am thinking about that day because I was braindead on the Internet then, too. Celsius, protein bar, things had begun all thick and ugly and then I’d been whisked away into a big black car, shuttled to the bar at Nine Orchard, my friends convincing me to stick around and then I did, I stuck around for a while, I never really left after that, come to think of it. “It’s Deep Tech Week in New York,” Shannon tells me, today - whatever that means. She sends me an event as such, and I investigate the schedule for the rest of this week from there. Deep Tech Week is a week of events about Tech, and they added the word Deep in front of it to make it seem more cool, I realize quickly. “Turning Science Fiction into Reality,” the text on the website says, and I don’t really like the sound of that. I find that premise, as strictly a premise, material reality aside, even, to be nearly cartoonishly evil. But, I suppose I’ll try to be less pedantic. I eat a sugar cookie (gluten free). Two protein bars from that new brand DAVID. A brand activation crispy sandwich from Joe And The Juice. The packaging is orange instead of that usual nice pastel pink. KEVIN DURANT, the packing says. It is nine pm, and I am suddenly ravenous. Good. Looks like I got my corporeality back. I really was planning to go to the Deep Tech Party tonight, but the rain started in an instant, in the exact instant I was set to leave, really. Like it’s trying to communicate some form of serendipity, reason, warning, whatever. Monday is the day where I let myself get every last thing done on my phone. My eyes burn. It rots the soul. My week continues and I become much more particular with myself. Tuesday, April 2 It’s not that I mind being kind of exhibitionist, even, but I can’t control the feedback loop and I start to drive myself mad. Taking stock of the state of the union like THINGS THAT ARE "IN": Swimming
WHAT I DID Monday, September 22 On the Upper West Side, there are stone townhouses and quiet streets and nice branzino and diet coke with lemon and they bring us baskets of red pesto and baguette and memories both good and bad become holographic quite quickly. New York is not all rotten. There are the last days of summer to take care of. Last days of gluttony. Last days of Reading Series. In a cab downtown to meet Lily with a stomach ache, Lily tells me that she is at a bar meeting boys. I meet her on the street. She’s wearing a white dress and she looks sparkling. There are others, on the steps, out here, and we all do the whole charade of all pretending like we have all never met. Lily met a boy at the bar who wants to take her on a road trip with his dogs, she tells me. You’re too young for me, but it’ll be fun while it lasts, the boy tells Lily. He sends each individual word as a separate message and then shares a video of two pitbulls sparing on a field of plastic turf. Lily lays her phone flat in her hand and we loom over it in the orange September sort of night. The video plays on an infinite loop. The dogs unhinge their massive jaws and aim to swallow a basketball whole. You’ll go upstate and get mauled to death by this guy’s pitbulls, I tell Lily. I’m not going upstate, Lily tells me. We walk further downtown, trace the usual path to a magazine launch in a night club that I thought would be more crowded. We sit in the backroom, and you can hear the readings better here than if you claw your way to the front like everyone else, but we probably appear to be kind of checked out. I’m going to save you, Lily tells me. We walk to Funny Bar where Sam is smoking outside. Am I safe to go inside, I ask Sam. He nods and flicks his hand towards the door. His friends are all from The Internet, and they introduce themselves by alias. Standing by the bar and Sam is saying that Los Angeles is it now. I stand a little halfway outside the conversation circle with my shirt pulled pretty tight around me and contribute a few half hearted sentiments about how Los Angeles can’t be it. The cars, the sprawl, the niceties, the plastic surgery. It’s got to be Austin, Sam’s friend is saying. It’s the same stale conversation topic as usual. How New York is over. Culture is over. Sam is listing a few mid to low tier Los Angeles based Internet personalities around which a new and transgressive art scene could revolve. I am dead sober, and therefore relieved to notice that I do not float out of my body and watch myself say something annoying and off-beat, like I inevitably would if I were drunk. None of those people have a mass fanbase of beautiful women, I point out to Sam. In Los Angeles, you’d find fifteen e-girls and they’d have to take Ubers. Sam agrees that this could potentially be a problem. If it’s uninteresting here, then it’s uninteresting everywhere, but I understand why everyone is seeking renewal. Like The Internet isn’t alive and everyone isn’t talking about the same things everywhere. Like Sam and his crew could wash up on Hollywood Boulevard and say the same things five years later, to a five years younger crop of wonderful young girls, fresh eyed and eager, they’d spawn out of nowhere, they would never have heard all of the things that have already been said before. Tuesday, September 23 Watching the gray light filter through the windows of a studio where everything is tan or cream or pale blue or gold. Watching a waiter at a cafe down the street bring over black coffee, cannoli, and strawberries in a chalice. Start the day with solitude. I have never lived like this before. A smooth and slick kind of woman across from me is talking about her sister who broke up with her boyfriend after meeting a Danish stone carver who believes in hard work and apprenticeship and not necessarily general education. The sister became repulsed by her boyfriend after spending time with the stone carver because she felt her boyfriend had too pragmatic a view on life. The sister left her passport at her ex’s place for one whole week and needs an ego death. She needs a concrete understanding of the next couple years. She wants to continue to go to school for forever, though this part, the whole family agrees is fine. The girl across from me is practically dripping gel from her slicked back bright red bun. She’s cloaked in business casual and a bad attitude. She’s drinking a cappuccino and she’s off to pilates. I am wondering if I would find her smug and didactic demeanor less off putting if she were more beautiful. She is wearing a stripped shirt and she gestures a J-Crew sleeve towards me and my own striped shirt as she leaves. It’s like a movie, she says. My shirt is softer and thinner and I want to coil the sleeves up and climb inside. It’s like mimes, I respond. Mimes? she asks. I do not mime. I hope she knows what that word means. It is not so much a thing of feeling out of place. I have worlds of characters and oddities at my fingertips. I like characters and oddities, which, along with a desire driven by ennui and terror to remain right at the very center of things, is why I am still here. I tend to like when people are abrasive, because it means they are fixated on just one thing. I watch the woman leave and I know for certain that I do not like her but it is not a thought that troubles me too much. It is a thought that passes like a cloud. Wednesday, September 24 Later, the air conditioning is off, and I’m pacing through empty health food aisles, drawing signs of the moon in class; waxing crescent moon, Libra moon, PLS GO FETCH ME THE MOON. Later, someone is talking about bio weapons at another party downtown. The genomes, the rapture, the clarity, the apocalyptic ideation. Please do not stress me out right now, the man on stage at the party is saying. I do not like that question. A different question. Could someone in the audience please ask one precise and better question? I see Iris and her blond hair bobbing up and down across the traffic stop as I stand outside the ice cream shop taking stock of my day and my night. Iris is carrying bright-blue-epson-salt and she is walking back towards a glass apartment in the sky. Do you want to sit, Iris asks? Inside? The rotating apartment in the sky. One rotation used to be mine. I can survive going inside. No, outside. We sit on the benches at the edge of the street as the ice cream shop closes, and I tell Iris all about how much things have improved. I have not been home all day, I tell Iris. I throw up my hands. Performative exhaustion. The whole ordeal is pleasant. Iris is very buoyant today. You should write aphorisms, Iris tells me. Passivity responds to harshness. Lethargy responds to good metabolic function. Have you noticed how all the energy here has come whirling-back-to-life? Iris starts telling me about the state of things. She has figured out where she stands when it comes to her positioning in the state of things. She has surmised who will be left behind. I nod. I clarify my own positions and I mean it. So we agree, Iris says. Good! I tell Iris about how I was at a French Cafe in Chinatown drinking matcha with almond milk which surprised my friends because they would have presumed that someone becoming Catholic would take coffee and drink it with whole milk, preferably raw. I tell Iris about how a lot has changed but I am still not so sure. I tell Iris about how culture isn’t dead but a lot of people have just decided not to be a part of it. I don’t say all of this out loud. I am still not so sure. Every apartment I go to is full of relics. Every party I go to is the same. Thursday, September 25 Sitting at Bar Oliver with Celia and it’s all red leather booths, light jazz music, non alcoholic beer which can be good for estrogen levels in women and black coffee and my eyes keep following the ceiling fans in circles. The rain has come and washed everything clean. I can have anything I want. I hang my purse on the metal arm of the tableside lamp. Incandescent bulbs. Write a note on the top of my planner. I CAN HAVE ANYTHING I WANT BUT I CAN’T HAVE EVERYTHING I WANT. Chinatown in the rain is cinematic and less like the land of leggings and small dogs that is increasingly stretching its grimy tendrils out and expanding all over downtown Manhattan. Celia turns her laptop around to show me a photograph of a light wood living room, checkered yellow table cloth, soft and warm armchair. This looks like your parents house, Celia says. Where did you find that, I ask. I found it on Tumblr, Celia says. We go for a walk along the East River, where the rain and the heat have turned everything kind of the same shade of fairytale gray. Celia tells me stories as we walk. Sylvia was an heiress and her dad was an inventor. Camilla was a tragic figure. Lucy was a ghost. I can imagine there were a lot of inventors coming out of that part of the world, I tell Celia. Why do you imagine that?, Celia asks me. Because there’s little to do but the temperament of the area is less mundane and passive than in neighboring states, I explain. The opioid crisis never hit, Celia agrees. There was no heroin, and so people invented things. We walk past the Governors Island Ferry and a kind of dilapidated and green Casa Cipriani. This is where the art fair was, Celia says. I have brain fog, I say. I go home, cheerful and ill. I go to an album release party where the singer is shaking with tears streaming down his face as the songs play, and then very cheerful and calm as he greets his wife and friends. I go to a Right Wing magazine launch and then to a celebration for a zine about ETHICS. I listen to the same song until I can’t bear it anymore. Take the M to the end of the line. Take photos of the tennis courts here, because they’re glistening in the rain and night. I show the bartender at Gotscheer Hall my passport from Switzerland and he beams. You should work here, he says. I beam back. I should work here, I say. Gotscheer Hall is huge and cavernous and covered with murals of fairytales. It’s like a whole huge world here. The world of Gotscheer Hall, and then the world of the fairytales that line its walls. It’s a Whole Huge World, I say. I say this over and over again. I took the train to the end of the M line, and then I remembered that it’s a whole huge world. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, October 6 From 4:40pm at Film Forum — Bresson’s Four Nights Of A Dreamer (1972) screens. - “Third filming (following Visconti’s) of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, transposed to ’70s Paris.” Worth seeing before it closes.
Inline links: Film Forum, Four Nights Of A Dreamer
Right my wrongs mostly through not repeating them and forgive those who have wronged me mostly through prayer Wednesday, October 8 In the mood for beautiful items and caution to the wind, I spent last night with memories, collages, beautiful images of beautiful things. Spent last night making drawings on the floor and watching home videos and pawning through little gold crosses for sale on vintage resale scammer sites. Little gold chains with amethysts. Blue pearls. White pearl chains. Tiny little silver hands clutched together. I wanted everything. Wanted a ceramic box stuffed chock full of precious stones. I reconsidered what I wanted. I wanted to unearth new memories. I wanted to recall everything I worried I’d forgotten. On a flash drive, I wanted to find a video from a winter. One can tell it is winter because everyone in the frame is wearing big coats and has that sort of frosty happy manic sun set early look in their eyes. I wanted to throw a dinner party. I wanted to print out every video I’d ever taken from every dinner party I’d ever thrown and keep them on polaroid papers in my bedside table. Wanted the videos to play on printed paper like a film when I touched them. Wanted to open my bedside table and take out pieces of paper that came to animation-style-life with simulacras of candles and autumn and freezing early evening air and the part where the doors close and the guests are gone and one says, that was a good dinner party. I have been to the movies, a concert, ballroom dancing, writing class. Everything is changing because of something in the Blood Moon and wind and ambitions came roaring back to life along with urgency pertaining to health and rejuvenation and someone else’s problems usurped my own. I walk to Grace’s concert in the evening. How did the blood moon treat you? Sam asks me inside the venue. Dark and small. Grace’s face was swimming all around the televisions on the wall and her voice was sweet like an angel and my new friends were reassuring me that if they saw someone scribbling symbols on post-it notes in writing class they would be intrigued and not disturbed. The Blood Moon was up and down, I tell Sam. Makes sense, Sam tells me. On account of my Pisces Moon. On account of things I don’t believe in. On account of a psychic who said something like this might happen and for now I could expect a little while longer, at least, of sparkling water in the East Village and holding court by the East River and a tip-toeing holding-steady kind of limbo-life that lasts for a few months and maybe years, though not forever. There is a train to the ocean again, tomorrow. That should shake things up. Thursday, October 9 I missed the train to the ocean by one instant, and so the yellow cab glides right past Moynihan Train Hall and then back towards Soho and a murky turtle pond, unpacked bags, more of the same. Do you feel grief because it is the first day of Fall, Amelia asks me. Is it something in the air? Was it something in the Blood Moon? Things have become all crisp and wane, you see. I feel grief because I missed my train, I tell Amelia. I am craving a sense of everything empty and clean and gray autumn ocean and a world where nothing ever changes and nothing ever stagnates all the same. This is the only sort of thing I have strong opinions about. My whims and also, what is beautiful and what is not. I was sitting by the fire at The Marlton, earlier, and the girls across the table were trying to conjure up strong opinions. Mostly trying to find moral fault lines in the structure of things that they might crack open and uno-reverse for the sake of mostly their own personal gain. It was so depressing to listen to. I stopped listening. Friday, October 10 On the first day of Perfect Autumn, Iris and I go to The Commerce Inn for dinner. We are still quite young and are going to live quite a long time, Iris says. A random stranger at The Marlton Hotel told me and Amelia not to be so hard on ourselves and I thought he was chastising our lifestyles choices and not just being invasive yet kind and so I nodded violently and said ‘I know, I know, I know,” I tell Iris. The Commerce Inn is the sort of place one can only go in evening, and in fall or mainly winter though it is known for ‘Brunch.’ Tonight feels like a very Autumnal affair. Dark and surrounded by fallen leaves. The moon is Void Of Course, the stranger at The Marlton told me. Iris and I order oysters and bone marrow and fluke. The last time I was here, I ordered potted shrimp and it was snowing and I tucked carry-on baggage under the table, filled up on wine and aioli, caught an overnight flight to Los Angeles straight through the storm. At tea today, Celia told me; I don’t care about anything if I’m not nostalgic. That’s because you value intensity above all other things and cannot comprehend any other structure to a way a life should be, I told Celia. It’s the right structure for a life to be, Celia told me. I agree, I told Celia. The threads of things have been a bit disjoined. I am beginning Ninety Day Novel, I tell Iris. It wasn’t for me, Iris tells me. What was for you? I ask Iris. Becoming possessed, Iris tells me. She tells me some other things, too. She doesn’t tell me what to do. I kind of lost my nostalgic fervor, I tell Iris. I know you love the winter, Iris tells me. So, it is just one life all at once, which I’ve been telling myself since June and I am finally starting to believe. Iris and I start to walk to The Hudson. We reroute towards Greenwich Village and it is finally getting freezing. I am finally getting sick of talking about these sorts of things. I will talk about something else, soon. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, October 13 From 4pm at Roxy Cinema — The Downtown Festival continues today and all week. At 6:15pm; world premiere of The Isdal Man by Gus Dapperton, with a Q&A moderated by Lucas Hedges. A film about Scandinavia and a vlogger (?) - I hope to make it to this. From 8:15pm; Love New York (Anthony Di Mieri). From 10:45pm; City Wide Fever.
Backlinks
- Big Huge World
- [[issues/2024-06-06_collected-agenda-3_full|COLLECTED AGENDA #3]]
- Live Diary.
- Places
- The Downtown Festival
- Void of Course