Los Angeles
Article
Los Angeles is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 32 times across 32 issues between September 21, 2024 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I like what they say about the sensibility of Los Angeles”; “In Los Angeles (at Monty Bar) from 9pm”; “A rare Los Angeles x New York crossover”. It most often appears alongside Night Club 101, New York, Matthew Gasda.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 32
- Issue count: 32
- First seen: September 21, 2024
- Last seen: March 06, 2026
Appears In
- I wish I had more to say about fashion week.
- Collected Agenda (lite)
- Moral Framework
- Life before inositol
- Burn my diaries
- Dream Logic
- My lame blog
- My Glass House
- Rules for Clarity
- Here, There, Everywhere
- Panopticon-ing Everyone
- Total Nightmare Policy
- generative and godly secrets
- A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again
- Coffeeshop Gossip
- Do you find everything interesting? Have you ever been bored? Was your last emotion in 2015?
- Drinking Dreams
- City Built on Crystals
- Aura-Abysmal
- Apocalyptic Ideation
- Big Huge World
- Void of Course
- Fever Dreams
- Winter (03)
- Florida, Massachusetts (03)
- Hotel Lobby Gossip
- COLLECTED AGENDA
- Lost Week
- How To Break Paralysis
- California-At-Home
- Yellow-all-around
- Humanoid-Robots
Related Pages
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- Night Club 101 (20 shared issues)
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- New York (18 shared issues)
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- Matthew Gasda (14 shared issues)
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- Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research (12 shared issues)
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- Confessions (11 shared issues)
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- EARTH (11 shared issues)
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- KGB (11 shared issues)
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- David (10 shared issues)
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- Amelia (9 shared issues)
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- Anika Jade Levy (9 shared issues)
-
- El Salvador (9 shared issues)
-
- Jean’s (9 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 go to dinner at Mamo, which is not new but is a new spot to me. I sit outside. I’m with my friends who are actresses, filmmakers. I like the way they think about things and I like what they say about the sensibility of Los Angeles. Most feelings are captured better in movies and music than in scene reports.
Inline links: Mamo
In Los Angeles (at Monty Bar) from 9pm — Nag Nag Nag presents A Celebration of the Music of Suicide & Alan Vega. Special performances include Liz Lamere (Alan Vega’s wife).
From 8pm — Car Crash Collective and Charm School Mag will be at Mood Ring. A rare Los Angeles x New York crossover from two of the best magazines / reading series at the forefront of the Writing Renaissance. Ft. Sarah Velk, Bernard Cohen, Vivi Hayes, Rax King, Donny Morrison, and Benin Gardner.
Inline links: Car Crash Collective, Charm School Mag, Mood Ring, Sarah Velk, Bernard Cohen, Vivi Hayes, Rax King, Donny Morrison
Wednesday, January 8 Meeting with Beckett and Jonah this morning at Caffe Reggio to discuss Tense - Reggio is full and so Beckett suggests Dante. It’s not like he remembered it, now. It’s a coffee shop, he says, but it’s a cocktail bar now. Expensive green and red martinis in thin glasses whirling through the room even now, at two pm. They still let us sit for coffee. I have an interview after. Madelyn texts me. At Altro Paradiso at 3pm, they are saying goodbye to the head chef. I’ve gone to Altro Paradiso a few times recently, because Madelyn works there mostly, although even independent of that it’s the best food I’ve had in New York in a while. Today, I was in a rush, the plans were last minute. I'm still wearing my workout clothes and their ‘archival lululemon’ - hand-me-downs from a closet of a friend of my mothers when I was about thirteen years old. The shirt is striped and black and white and a small band bearing slogans like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” folds up or down at the hem, depending on how flagrantly antisocial you feel like being on that particular day. I’m keeping the band folded under today. I’m wildly underdressed but it’s afternoon, the restaurant isn’t even technically open yet. There’s a toast to the chef and I’m the only outsider in attendance and so I stay at the bar while the group of staff and friends and family assemble. It’s very special, even to bear witness to as someone uninvolved. There’s a heart and soul to food and drink and service that other industries, even creative industries, really don’t have in the same way. I’m a tiny bit tipsy, now. I need to start hostessing again. I make this note on my phone: “NEED TO START HOSTESSING AGAIN!!!!” We stay at Altro Paradiso til dinner starts, and we continue to stay till it feels like dinner is about to end. Everything is magical - the alla prima cocktail, wine, dirty martini, pane e ricotta, salad with figs and dates, octopus, olives, oysters under beds of thinly sliced veggies, malfatti (which is pasta that is like little pillows), linguine al nero (which is pasta with squid ink and cuttlefish and basil), a few deserts - pistachio ice cream and the pear cake. The afternoon turns to a sparkling evening. I walk home. I go elsewhere, after - fun too, but I probably shouldn’t have. I should probably learn when to call an evening. Decadence in excess, turns all that sparkles sour. Thursday, January 9 It's been the same day on repeat so far this year. The same three days, really. Rinse and do it again. The year has only held nine days. I can't view my stagnation with too much harshness. Decadence, in contrast, should be viewed with harshness. Los Angeles is burning up and it feels uncouth to talk about this here as this tragedy is not my life, but I can't stop watching. Most emotions are triggered through all five senses - it's a strange feeling of muted horror to see destruction of places and lives you know on a screen, detached from your physical experience but visible in real time in your cognizant mind - peripheral vision. I accidentally get stuck in the Louis Vuitton x Murakami line in SoHo. I accidentally steal a pair of Split sweatpants from the gym. I accidentally read all the books on the 4chan 2024 Top 100 Lit Board list. I'm on tiktok watching videos of the apocalypse overlaid with Lana del Rey audio. I’m browsing r/lainfluencersnark and they have a lot to say about the way their parasocial relationships are handling the apocalypse. I tried to write something about phones and chaos and end times but it was silly. These are resources / writing from people in LA. The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
Inline links: The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 19 Wet hair in the lobby at the gym. I am criticized only very slightly, and I am struck with nearly physical rage. I can’t walk anymore today. When I walk, I am compelled to think - then write - about myself. I have this huge body of work. I’ve written 364,133 unpublished words since my birthday in June, but they are all about myself, and the ugliest parts of myself at that. “You must be able to convert some of your journals into work you can use,” some of my friends say, but I don’t think anyone realizes just how bad they are. Any problem, the smallest problem, I can twist and chew and solve, often through written and rotating self deprecation and self congratulation that renders said problem irrelevant. I can do this over and over and over again, for hours daily, if I'm being honest. It’s not necessarily bad as a limited practice - churn out sludge so that it doesn’t live in your mind - but it becomes more and more excessive, nauseatingly so. I meet Madelyn at Shosh for dinner. The snowstorm has started. I texted David at the gym earlier: "big snowstorm coming." "Link me an article or you're full of shit," David said, but I wasn't, because it's here, and it's falling in big fat clumps. Shosh is lovely. It’s a new vegan wine bar in the West Village, which I would roll my eyes at as a concept, but Madelyn’s friends work there and I walk there in the blizzard - enter to a silver bar, an open kitchen, cream walls with a perfect archway cut into them that frames shades of glass wine bottles and assembled rows of thin wine glasses. We don’t get wine, but we do get gem salad, celeriac shawarma with fluffy bread, mushrooms, by which they mean every variety of mushroom you can imagine and a perfect green sauce to accompany. “Hummus is one of those things you think is all the same, but then you have good hummus…,” Madelyn’s friend who works there says, and he’s right, because the hummus here is determinately different. Better. Madelyn tells me she likes showing me good food, and I like this, too. Left to my own devices it’s all instant pistachio pudding and cold mashed potatoes eaten while standing up. This isn’t how one should live - slogging through the essential details of survival and routine like it’s something to get over with, not something to enjoy. At the very least, it’s something to be appreciated. I like meals like this. There’s the Casual Encounters reading later, the fundraiser for Los Angeles reading at that gallery in Tribeca, although all the galleries seem like they are suddenly in Tribeca these days. We’re there early. I can’t find the building, can’t get out of the snow. You do get out of the snow, eventually. You pick a few GoFundMe’s from the options laid out on the table, so many options on the table. You sit on the couch so you’re removed from the room, you have a birds eye view in that sense even though technically, you’re beneath, not above, it all. “You can see the social dynamics from here,” your friend says, kind of kidding, kind of not. You can see how the room clusters itself, at least. I stay for the readings, but not for long after. Walk home in the sleet and ice. It's a blizzard, but nothing is really sticking. Streets are mostly quiet - people in the windows of Lucia and Cipriani but otherwise it’s all empty. My reflection surprises me in the mirror when I get home. I only wear dresses, but today I’m wearing jeans. Mundanity, mundanity, mundanity. David says he wants to go to KGB, and at first I want to go too, but then I decide that I don’t. He leaves, walking into the storm as I’m coming out of it. I start to feel sick around eleven pm. I feel strange, falling asleep. Being sick really scares me. I hope it goes away. Monday, January 20 I expected to wake up sad this morning but I didn't. The snow didn't stick, but a thin layer of it did freeze. I'm sliding down the streets, and they aren't empty anymore. Bright, bright, icy light today. Coca Cola and muffin at the bodega for David. Celsius for me. Green tea mango and Cyanocobalamin. I need black coffee. Inauguration today. I walk and write for ninety minutes. I tried to join the David Lynch Meditation Live Stream at noon, but I got the time zones wrong and I was meant to join at three. It’s five now. Too late. Sitting in a steam room in a cloud of eucalyptus smog. The semester begins tomorrow, and other things, too. An end to my life of leisure, or more generously, an end to responsibility only as self directed. I feel like I was starting to figure it out. Non-fiction in the morning, fiction at night - my friend Grazie advised me of this schedule this summer. Being honest, though, I need more intensive direction. Natasha goes to take snow photos in Washington Square Park, but she says that Jill Stein is there and the park is so so so loud. The theme is: anti imperialism.. She sends me a photo of the birds in the snow. In an ironic twist, David is sick, but I am not. He orders sushi from Soho Sushi. He gives me five pieces from a california roll. I make cinnamon chai tea in the mug my dad got me from the ceramics shop near Mishaum. Every mug there is different. Mine has coarse leaves all over it, and a special rivet where your hand fits. “This apartment is pretty magical when it’s icy,” David admitted earlier, because it’s a greenhouse roof and so when you look up today it’s all like a snow globe. Icicles swirl in soft formations overhead, melting in morning light and then refreezing slightly differently as the sky turns hazy. I have my head under the cover. I’m reading other people’s diaries. Kafka, Anais Nin, I like the diaries I find online, too. I like the diaries I am sent. This isn’t my diary. I cannot stress that enough. My real diary is often quite ugly. This is one of the things I feel most guilty for. It’s strange, though. I wake up, I write in my secret diary, I walk for many miles, I write in my diary that I share online. It is good I will have less time, soon. Anya is staying with me tonight. David, in a friend's spare bedroom because I cannot, cannot, cannot get sick right now, too. It's so nice tonight. Anya and I have been friends since we were two weeks old. I used to tell people that as a child - "this is my best friend since I was two weeks old." Dimes in the snow. Clandestino in the snow. I really like sitting in the corner of a bar until the night reaches its bitter end. Not tonight, though. It's only ten. Tuesday, January 21 My first real responsibility in a month, and it's canceled - a whim of the weather. The snow has melted overnight and in its place is chalky salt stained pavement as far as you can see. It looks like marble. They turned Soho into marble in the night. I try to run outside, but it's too cold. Bitter cold, not pleasant cold. I'm coughing up the chalky air. It's the coldest day of the year. There's a man on the street and he's running towards the train, sloshing coffee all over his suit but he doesn't seem to even notice, certainly he doesn't care. The drops are freezing to the sleeves of his camel hair jacket before they reach the ground. He's covered in little coffee icicles. I doubt it will stain. I had nightmares last night. Everyone knew I was Actually Bad. I woke up saying "help me", but I used to wake up talking about rituals in rural places, so this is not a negative progression in the storyline of my possible possession. The chalky pavement has turned to ice in the afternoon. Walking under the Washington Square arch on the way to Tibet House and its icier than ever. The ground is all glazed over. It’s the latest installment of the Arden Wohl’s reading series at Tibet House; Inauguration Edition this time. Madelyn is wearing a pink sweatshirt when I get there. Madelyn is telling me about knowing your own mind. Alex Auder reads about cock sucking and brings up a friend to read with her who enjoys the act, because she doesn't "I feel demeaned when I suck dick. I feel demeaned when I teach yoga," she says. She reads a story about a life in servitude to someone famous who reminds her of Donald Trump. Tonight is a night where as soon as I have one glass of wine, I wish I didn’t. The haze sets in, and I want it to clear. Beckett arrives. The readings are mostly good, but I’m jittery. I sit in the lobby and I eat some grapes and cheese, replace the wine with water. “Over the years I noticed from my overlord that peasants were increasingly behaving like they were nobles,” Alex Auder is saying, when I return. “There are more cameras than there are people in the world,” Gideon Jacobs is reading, later. I can’t stop drifting in and out of the room. I’m worried about some things, about some people. I get like this sometimes, and I wish I could get it to stop. I go to the bathroom and I return again, to a reading about Courtney Love. “She used to do water ballet and she was getting into the grateful dead.” “She lied a lot and never listened directly but she was a sponge - she takes a word from an incidental periphery and works it into her trope in real time. She’s that fast.” “She said she was born on my birthday; July 1st, but she was born a week later; July 8th” This is my type of lie, I’m thinking. A lie to please. False enchantment. It’s a juvenile compulsion, you mostly outgrow it, and if it was Courtney Love partaking then perhaps it was charming, but my visceral reaction is one of repulsion. Lizzi Bougatsos reads about Gary Indiana. She sits on the floor and she clips her toenails. “We shall mark memory with reverence,” Arden is saying. Beckett is telling me that it’s cool to be at a reading that’s an older crowd, and it is, it’s wine and cheese, there’s no disco party to follow. Beckett introduces me to his acquaintance from Paris. They are talking about Godot and prison sentences. Samuel Beckett gave his Nobel Prize money to a jail org, or was it prisone.org One time, there was a prison break after a performance of Godot. Madelyn is making tape formations on her phone with the other Lacanians. Lacan as separated from psychoanalysis. Lacan as applicable to real life. I’m just gleaning sentences. These ideas aren’t mine. Cigarette outside and then a burger at the orthodox Jewish establishment nearby. We forgot they can only do vegan cheese on burgers here. A lychee martini instead. They’re playing pop music so loud Wednesday, January 23 I hear my neighbors door shut as I’m poised to leave this morning. Decide, instead, to hover in the kitchen. We don't really like each other, my neighbor and I. Nothing was ever said, but there’s an underlying hostility. I have friends over too late, too often. The walls are thin. I'm glad to be waking up at the same time as the rest of the world, though. Sometimes - up all night, becoming manic around five am, this can be nice, but it's usually not. Normal hours. Normal cycles of day and night. The ice has come and smoothed everything over. Too cold to listen to music on my walk to school. I'm peeling off layers in an office, at the gym, the hallway of our apartment is becoming salty and dusted with the chalky snowstorm residue that first coated the surface of everything, and that now is starting to settle. Nothing is volatile. Such placidity, suddenly, but I’m not bored. All the calm in the world. Thank god. It really was about time. And so, you eat two chalky protein pop tarts on the bench at the gym. There are two girls with thick french accents in the locker room parallel to you. "He's a fucking retard, he only calls me at three am and it's only because he wants to sleep with my friends," says one of the girls. She's wearing a sherpa jacket. KHRISJOY, it says, in big red dripping letters. Spray paint imitation. You look it up - $2145 online. It's so ugly, but you're vaguely impressed. Of course you are. You're wearing a Versace sports bra that you bought for a music festival in high school. Absurd. The people watching here is good. The girl is still talking. She's so furious. "And he would be calling to sleep with me, but he knows he can't, fucking retard," she is saying. This version of the narration makes more sense - her rage rooted in something adjacent to jealousy. You gather your things. You gather your tote bags. It's too cold for so many bags. Your hands get numb out there. You're in a humid basement now, but you can't stay here forever. There's an artists talk tonight, but do you have it in you to attend? Cheese and sausage for dinner at home. I forgot about the dishes and I left the sink running for an hour. I’ve never known how to dress for the weather, but that doesn’t mean I mind the extremes. Today - my mother’s gloves, a borrowed Urbit hat from David, a beanie really, it looks insane but it’s too freezing for me to mind. More isn’t always more. More is often so, intolerably, annoying. I don’t want to wear a coat. My books arrive today. Mostly for school, plus one Ruby recommended. I’ll read them all - I’m glad that I have reason to. Salvador - Joan Didion The Company She Keeps - Mary McCarthy The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin Confessions - Saint Augustine The Situation and the Story - Vivian Gornic A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf A Silent Woman - Janet Malcom Are You My Mother - Alison Bechdel The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson The Atrocity Exhibition - J. G. Ballard WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 23 From 6pm - 8pm at 61 Lispenard — Canada NY and Eighth House present Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Eighth House is “an interdisciplinary residency for artists and curators located in Central Vermont.” The exhibition serves as a benefit for this very special residency.
Inline links: fundraiser for Los Angeles, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1LMK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6ba9ea7-5431-438d-968d-03f0204b83b3_1179x624.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TlLq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75d232d2-5720-42ad-a6bc-aafacf53eb67_560x562.jpeg, Tibet House, Alex Auder, Gideon Jacobs, Lizzi Bougatsos, Arden, KHRISJOY, Salvador -, The Company She Keeps, The Fire Next Time, Confessions, The Situation and the Story, A Room of One’s Own, A Silent Woman, Are You My Mother, The Argonauts, The Atrocity Exhibition, Canada NY, Eighth House, Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude.
From 7pm at Heaven Can't Wait — Cynosure presents the first of a two night fundraiser for Los Angeles, featuring Alex Arthur, Precious Human, Truman Flyer, and more.
Inline links: Heaven Can't Wait, Cynosure
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
At Earth Los Angeles from 4pm - 8pm — Montez Press Radio & Earth present the first in a series of collaborative shows in Los Angeles. KILLING TIME features author Tom O’Neill and investigative journalist Christian Hansen in conversation about American murder cults. Readings and DJ sets to follow. Attend in person, listen on https://radio.montezpress.com/#/, orlivestream on Earth’s Youtube.
Inline links: https://radio.montezpress.com/#/, Youtube
Tuesday, March 11 The things I overhear begin the process of reconsidering all over again. You confess that the knee jerk reaction is one of possession over things you do not even want. You confess that you do not want to tell that story even if this particular story is one that has always been yours. We go to Tiny Bar, and then the Odeon. Earlier, it was like they were doing a character study in the things you overheard. Wednesday, March 12 I went to St Dymphna tonight, but I didn't hear a single reading and I didn't watch Heat (1995) when I got home, even though David had it playing on the projector, even though he kept on playing scenes of significance over and over and over again. This is me and you, he kept saying, when some girl in some house with some glistening pool in Los Angeles calls her husband names like gambling addict and child the years keep passing by, and then the husband screeches off through Hollywood in a nice sleek car. It's not us, really, but this wouldn't be so bad. I want to party beautifully forever, David said a while ago. The key part being: beautifully. Maybe this is how people party in Los Angeles. This isn't really how people party in New York. And I should have gone to Poetry Project, to the after party for the Anne Imhoff show which I am guilty to admit I never saw in the first place and now it's too late, to the club, maybe. It's not that I worry what I missed, it is just that time passes faster when I am not here there everywhere, and I like it best when time slows down. In my dreams, my consciousness can take one second and turn it into one year. Here are the songs tonight. And the shoes are the shearling style cowboy boots my grandmother gave me from her closet last thanksgiving. Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Inline links: Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
(Los Angeles) From 7pm at 1640 N Spring St, Floor 1 — Car Crash Collective and Current Jam present a Fire Benefit Event. Readings by Aiden Arata, Greg Mania, Brandon Sward, Brandon Harris, and Madde Connors. DJ sets by Perfect Angel Protection Force.
Inline links: Car Crash Collective, Current Jam
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
LOS ANGELES - From 8pm at Lumiere Cinema — WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM LA Premiere. Q&A with: Peter Vack, Chloe Cherry, Betsey Brown, moderated by Al Warren. Afterparty at No Vacancy with The Ion Pack + Chloe + Betsey + Peter.
Inline links: Lumiere Cinema, WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
LOS ANGELES - From 6:30pm at Night Gallery — Celebrate the launch of On The Rag Vol 1. Readers include Rachel Kushner, Eileen Kelly, Stella Barey, Victoria Davidoff, Zara Schuster, and more. RSVP - http://www.casualencountersz.com/rsvp.html
LOS ANGELES from 7pm at 620 S. Union Ave — Substack presents A Night of Desire at Spa Palace. Readings by Aparana Nacherla, Mina Le, Paige Elkington, and more.
Inline links: A Night of Desire at Spa Palace
WHAT I DID Monday, July 28 Amelia is at the apartment when I arrive, bearing cloned keys and summer dresses. It is not a relief to return, I am afraid. Tiptoe across dusty slanted floors and this sense of oddity and dread creeps back no matter how quiet I am about it. There are planes overhead and I have loved all this glass before, but I am clenching my eyes shut now; wishing for drapes that close. Earlier, the flight from London was delayed hours upon hours and things went awry the moment I was left alone. Comparing notes of past present and future and then I laid my roller suitcase horizontal on the bathroom floor to take a seat and think about it. Left my passport in the airport bar where the woman beside me was making friends with every single customer cycling through aside from myself and then I sprinted over to security, where the lights were flashing all schizophrenic and neon and no one would speak. You'll miss your flight, dear, the airport attendant smiled. They opened a small door with a large electric key. They sent me to the Back Rooms. They sent me through endless identical silver doors and a mirror maze and down a long gray magic carpet. I emerged on the other side to find another magic carpet just like the first. I imagined infinite magic carpets extending in every direction. Motion activated so the feedback loop would reveal itself every time I thought I reached solid ground. I was not moving horizontal anymore. It was a vertical descent into the underbelly of Heathrow. I forgot the status of Boeing VS0137. I forgot to ever leave. I woke up in the Kids Play Center. We've lifted your curse, the airport attendant beamed. Most slides can also be used as rafts, they tell me on the plane. Cartoon villain voice playing on Virgin-Atlantic-TV and they're blasting it through the cabin speakers, too. You were an A+ travel companion, they told me in the airport. I wake up to take stock of these things: safety guidelines and praise. I fall back asleep. Tuesday, July 29 After things fell apart in June, I did not eat or sleep for four days and three nights. On the fourth night, I called the NYPD informational line quite dizzy and more out of curiosity regarding physical resilience and atrophy than out of any sincere safety concern. If you cannot sleep tonight, then you can call me in the morning, the operator said. And so I was unconscious in an instant. Put some limits on one's own neurosis. I decided to stay up late last night. It was muggy and hot outside JFK, and I missed the moors and the fog for just an instant. Then, the glass doors slid open into hot sweaty americana summer and all else was forgotten. Felt a bittersweet sort of close to home. Sat on the curb. The airtrain to the car park turned onto the highway. Felt like a road trip. Felt like team sports, two-in-the-morning, intermission. I'd been so quiet that day. I had not spoken one word since Heathrow. Everybody understood that the apartment was rotting. Great place but full of mold. Great place but full of memories both good and bad. Somebody should have thrown out the milk. Somebody should have done something about the feng shui. The dead trees. The slant of the floors. The roof, which nearly caved in last winter. Three in the morning arrival but I asked Amelia if I could come over instead, and Amelia understood it would be best to sit on her floor. Amelia had been leaning into performance art. How was your vacation, Amelia asked. Not transgressive and weird, I sighed. But rejuvenating, pleasant, precious in the sort of way I'd like to hang onto. And I am feeling physically fit from all the walking and running that went on and on and on. The heat wave has not passed in New York despite one more week dwindling into summer, and I sleep until midday around when I open my eyes and begin to feel uneasy. The lines out the stores are down the block and everyone is becoming very thin. The summer foods are things like GREENS 01 Juice and maca-powder-peanut-butter-protein-bites and very rubbery cocktail shrimp at The Smith. It is Julia who suggests The Smith for dinner and I am not picky with those sorts of things. It is me who suggests the party, despite my increasing hopes, generally, to avoid these sorts of things. Wednesday, July 30 Sitting at Banter with the Big Breakfast and hot green tea reading fairytales. It was a nice night last night. Whirling sort of thing. Nightclub101 to KGB to following a group to Ludlow House to Ripple Room. The sort of thing I like as often as possible, but really must limit to now and then. Sitting at the Australian Cafe now, using my Moldavite to mark my place in my book. The fairytales are describing relentless compassion as a form of some sort of psychological warfare. Psychosexual manipulation. Relentless compassion so as to provide one with a moral advantage, knowing it is impossible for the recipient of such compassion to reciprocate. Relentless compassion so as to cast a desperate, selfish, striving plea for reciprocation. The second option is probably more common, but it would be nice to be kind of on a high horse. August will be like oysters at The Knickerbocker with the cocktail sauce in the martini glass and we're sitting by the cracked glass window and Drew says don't cut your hair not yet and so it'll be like humid heavy hair almost down to my waist now, sparkling water in plastic cups with lime and diet coke in a bikini and I will stay put for a while. I will sit at KGB sober in the evening like I do most every evening. They're tearing chocolate chip cookies apart with their hands at the table over and Amelia says she thinks a bit too much about herself to give too much thought to the existence of God but she remembers, as a child, crying tears of joy because she couldn't believe her luck. She just realized she had somehow made it into a human body on Earth, and she couldn't believe her luck. I don't wish the evenings went on too much longer. The timing is starting to feel just right. I want to fill a Desani water bottle with white claw and catch a cab to a pool party but the evening might start to feel too late. I'll read Fanny Howe, Thomas Hardy, Dawn Powell on the floor - big cracked hard cover dog eared copies of all my books. Then, I will pack up my books into Ikea plastic storage trunks. I will pack up all my books and dresses and then the movers will come. The movers will haul my things out the door. They will haul the place bare. I will turn off the air conditioning in this glass apartment in the sky, and then I will leave. August will be somewhere else. Thursday, July 31 Rebecca and I are making plans. Involving - The Chakras by C.W. Leadbeater and Esoteric Healing by Alice Bailey. I don’t want to work harder than I ever have before, but I do wish to be a bit more intuitive about it. Rebecca is telling me about Energy Hygiene in a Chaotic City. Rebecca is telling me about Seven Rays & Soul Typing. Taking Thomas Pynchon, guasha, monastery sage oil, yoga mat, mineral sunscreen up to the roof for Abundance Meditation and Contemplation. I receive good news. The best, really. I am sorry to be opaque, but something shifted in the winds in England. So far, I have managed to hold onto it here. Careful! Open up the blinds because it's foggy this morning which means we get to let some light in. No bright sunlight baking things alive. No leftover drinks or snacks from the Last Party Ever that was thrown last night. So - it’s a very strange day. I’d like to take a different approach to Caution. Generate me a definition. They generate me this definition: The deeper awareness of human limitations, the deceptive nature of false certainties, and the dangers of unchecked power. This will do. Friday, August 1 It’s an unusual sort of incoherence in my dreams today. The shelf above the bed is lined with wine glasses full of water, and there's an in between of sleep and something else - nyquil at six in the morning, cinnamon zyn at six in the morning, the friends went home around six in the morning and now it is sometime around noon, sunlight streaming in. I wake up gagging. In my dreams, the wine glass water was mostly poisoned. In the space between half awake, not all was poisoned but it was a Russian Roulette sort of thing. I take my chances. Chug water out of my safest bet. Wake up screaming. Fall asleep screaming. The Ikea boxes for the move are starting to fill up and I know it's me stuffing the plastic to the brim but I don't really remember. It's been recollection that's lacking, really. It's been a birthday dinner tonight. The sweetest kind in the Lower East Side. Dimes Square but it's just us, I said. Because it was in the general vicinity but the streets were all empty. A stupid joke, but everyone humored me. Everyone was beautiful and lovely and happy and I didn't drink a regrettable amount. A nice sort of night. Got stuck on Thomas Pynchon and now I can't read anything else. Got stuck on esoteric health and now the water is poison. Got stuck at karaoke and now my self proclaimed sulfate allergy is acting up. Wine and hypochondria. It becomes a bit self indulgent then, doesn't it? Saturday, August 2 If the movers weren't late, I'd be gone by now. But they are late, and so I am lying on the couch that’s being left behind in an Everlane striped tee and too-short Los Angeles apparel shorts feeling kind of sorry for myself. I'm not sure why I decided to scrounge up this sort millennial slop getup for the day of my very unceremonious departure. Feeling older than my years. Feeling like I was raised on Madewell and Ann Taylor or, whatever else it is that would feel nostalgic if I'd been born before 2000. Something other than Patagonia shorts and my sister's sweaters, anyways. Feeling culturally un-attuned. Feeling mostly sorry for myself because I am surrounded by grime. I've been flouncing around this place for a while, now. The clutter is so repulsive, and so much of it is new. There was never a day of really moving in, here. It was just step by step, one thing after another, little parcels that were easy to bring up and down and in and out and now; you wake up in the middle of the morning in a glass apartment in the sky to the sense that there is no space left. I would love to toss and toss and toss. I would love to close my eyes on this island of this couch amidst a swamp of Ikea boxes and tell the movers never mind. I would never open the boxes again. I would never do the dishes. I would wear polyester and sleep on the previous owners teak Scandinavian couch. I would sleep surrounded by trash. It would all become trash, because I would decide to throw it all out. What do we need to know?, the movers will ask, when they arrive. Do you find everything interesting? I will ask. Have you ever been bored? Was your last emotion in 2015? YAY, the movers will say. I am picking things up and putting them down. The movers will give me high fives. Me and three Serbian teens high-fiving in a glass apartment in the sky that I am soon to leave and never return. They will pick things up and put them down and haul them out and I will never return. Sunday, August 3 I have taken my things and never returned. All is well except, the lights here are a bit too fluorescent. The courtyard is nice for the turtle pond, but the brick blocks the sun. And, once there was a top lock but now there is not. There is a hole in my door and I can't get it out of my head. There is a hole in my door and now everything is all wrong. Sitting at GMT Tavern with a not very nice martini and the Thomas Pynchon book I just can’t finish or quit. Slow Learner. Slow Learner, just like me. Make it all about me me me. Life is like: another day in my dumb life on my dumb blog talking about me me me. Life does not have to be like this. Life could be like: the hovering curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion (Pynchon). I keep getting stuck on that quote. I keep getting stuck on entropy, which I do not hope to believe in. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, August 14 From 9pm at Silver Lining Lounge — Matt Weinberger and Scott Lipps present The Downtown Prom. Hosts include Sid Simons, Anika Jade Levy, Nicole Naloy, and more. Music by Sexy Damion, Blog Analog, Loose Buttons, and Boxxer. DJ sets and more.
LOS ANGELES - From 8pm at The Monty Bar — Car Crash Collective presents Summer Breakers. Readings by Jeff Weiss, Maryze, Tarek Ziad, Sage Groves, and Jordan Rountree. Djs Yuriel and Lucy Healy.
Inline links: The Monty Bar
LOS ANGELES: From 5pm - 9pm at 3110 W Sunset Blvd — Megan O’Dell presents WET, ft Brittany Menjivar, Sabra Binder, Kris Barit, Isabela Costa, and Shannon Evans. - “ an invitation to submerge yourself into the emotional depths of self-discovery, a celebration of our capacity for self-evolution and a testament to the power of feminine energy.”
Inline links: Megan O’Dell, WET
From 10pm - 4am at Soho Grand Hotel — Los Angeles Apparel throws a NYFW party celebrating the launch of the Soho Flagship Store. | RSVP required - rsvpnyfw@losangelesapparel.net
Inline links: Soho Flagship Store, rsvpnyfw@losangelesapparel.net
LOS ANGELES: From 5pm - 7pm at 1301PE — Petra Cortright presents her solo exhibition ‘quicksilver sea bubble dramamine dream’ - “What do you lose, what can you always have.”
Inline links: 1301PE, Petra Cortright
LOS ANGELES - From 6pm - 10pm at Human Resources — An evening of two short film screenings by artist Margaret Haines, paired with readings from cast and friends including Emily Anderson Tanja Laden, Aimee Goguen, and Fiona Duncan. | Sliding scale tickets
Inline links: Human Resources, tickets
LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at Taix — Evan Laffer and Ruby Zuckerman present readings by Mariah Flores, Ben Loory, Jesse Pearson, Nick Plett, Zara Schuster, and Gabby Sones. | Tickets from $10. Advance only. Venmo @evanlaffer.
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.
Los Angeles Apparel blue tights
LOS ANGELES - From 8pm at Earth — Muscle Man event. A reading, conversation, and live scroll with Jordan Castro and Tao Lin. Music by Ross Simonini.
LOS ANGELES - From 8pm - midnight at Earth — Jordan Castro and Cluny Journal present SILENCE. An evening of silence. No speaking, no phones.
WHAT I DID Monday, November 11 The first winter when I started to understand how things work here, I was crazy with momentum. Crazy like I was floating in air or maybe even made of it. It all started because it was too cold to walk slowly outside, and once we started picking up the pace - a quick clip in the night and the snow and it was a particularly windy winter - then everything else started to spiral a bit out of control. I wore velvet dresses to magazine offices for Christmas parties that winter and I was generally very uninhibited. I floated very warm and drunk off hot wine through a basement in Chinatown full of books and Arabian rugs for many nights in a row. In one night alone, I lost my voice and my phone and my sense of time passing all along. Sairose helped me wash up in the back of some night club, in a purple-lit party designed to simulate the void, at home and in love and in Los Angeles for a respite from the cold and all the can’t-stop-motion that came with it. Anyways, I slept on a floor under white arched ceilings pressed against a radiator for a few months after that. And I was certain I was not ready to be old yet and I’m still not, really, but there were other things too. 8am (present) - The first real day of winter, and so everything freezes over and then quiets in the soft start of snow outside. It’s fish and soup season, an old man at Caffe Reggio is saying. It reminds me of The Godfather (1972) in here, the old man is laughing. Stained glass lamps and the replicas of the Carvaggio paintings and white tiled ceilings and, since I gave up vice the goal has become to be a bit more quiet and clean about everything. Amelia wears Dries Van Noten jeans and a Calvin Klein black sweater and prada boots to meet me in the morning snow and read the things I wrote on paper. In the mornings, this time of year, it is good to brew things like bone broth, hot apple cider from the amish market, sardines in tomato sauce, your throat in black seed oil, your face in red light, and your thoughts in memories that resurface and ideas that reconstruct away from the architectures of unhappiness. Your aphorisms don’t make a ton of sense, Amelia tells me. I’m not writing aphorisms, I’m writing optimizations, I tell Amelia. At the bar last night, we ordered Fernets and diet coke and asked our guests if they considered themselves well adjusted and if they had tips to share pertaining to Esoteric Health. Do you know about Ray Peat, our guests asked. Do you know about royal jelly and methalyn blue and red light chicken lamps? Do you know about making good decisions for the benefit of yourself and the people around you? Kind of dizzy from two fernets on an empty stomach, Celia made a joke about her life and how it overlapped with mine. Don’t ever make any comparison to your life as it pertains to mine, I snapped. The bar was loud and so no one heard the vitriol but her. Is this what you want more than anything in the world?, Celia asked. To be able to say and do whatever you want without consequence? Howling wind outside, and we’ve been working on temperance. I wanted a lot of things, but I mostly wanted that. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, November 19 From 7:00 - 8:30pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Cabin Pressure opened yesterday, and there’s another performance tonight! A new play by Adi Eshman, directed by Jennesy Herrera. - “Set in a cabin at a ski resort, What begins as a light-hearted getaway spirals into a cocaine-and-beer-fueled disaster, with the groom’s sober brother-in-law as the unwilling witness to the chaos.” | tickets here (additional performances Nov 20, 21, 22)
LOS ANGELES: From 7:30pm at Airliner — Johnny St Grace performs. If I was in LA, this is where I would be.
Inline links: Airliner, Johnny St Grace
LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at Giovanni’s Room — Casual Encounters + On The Rag present Holiday Party: drinks, merriment, and super short readings from OTR archives, ft Suzy Exposito, Violetta Balkoff, Gabby Sones, Jonathan D’Aguilar, Sarah Wang, Ellis Kopple, Mia Culpa, Chantel Murphy, Zara Schuster, and Emma Camille Barreto. | BYOB, BYOFriends
Inline links: Giovanni’s Room, On The Rag
LOS ANGELES - From 6pm - 9pm at Formas — Forever Magazine celebrates the launch of Inheritance Issue & Flat Earth.
Los Angeles - From 7pm at Red Lion Tavern — Evan Laffer and Ruby Zuckerman present readings by Molly Crabapple, Robin Estrin, Eugene Kotlyarenko, Madeleine Kunkle, Joseph Moscow, and Sarah Wang.
Los Angeles — From 5pm - 8pm at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery — Jeans Generation opens. Curated by Ana Makharadze. - “Bringing together fifteen artists, the exhibition explores the psychology of daydreaming as a form of resistance and self-preservation, an interior space where imagination becomes both refuge and quiet defiance.”
LOS ANGELES - From 7pm - 9pm — Club Chess presents an evening of chess, wine, and music. DJ sets by A.L. Bahta and friends.
Inline links: Club Chess
Los Angeles - From 7pm at Red Lion Tavern — Evan Laffer and Ruby Zuckerman present readings by Molly Crabapple, Robin Estrin, Eugene Kotlyarenko, Madeleine Kunkle, Joseph Moscow, and Sarah Wang.
Los Angeles — From 5pm - 8pm at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery — Jeans Generation opens. Curated by Ana Makharadze. - “Bringing together fifteen artists, the exhibition explores the psychology of daydreaming as a form of resistance and self-preservation, an interior space where imagination becomes both refuge and quiet defiance.”
WHAT I DID Monday, January 5 Start the year at Cassandra’s apartment, and then a few days pass kind of breathless and stranded in this way. Her bedroom looks over St Vincent’s Ferrer, and it is light filled and sweet. Cards and paper star cut outs hung on red ribbon stream down the edges of the cream walls. A seashell necklace, Mary Magdalene portrait, books of Adorno and Mary Gaitskill. The bible. When my friends leave for the day, I do not. Rush of opening doors and boots on wood and winter air, and then they are gone. Cassandra’s apartment is very clean. It strikes me, somewhat uneasily, that everything I touch appears slightly less precise when I’m the one returning it to its proper place. Face oil left off kilter and kind of dripping. A little bit bad at treading gently in this place where I am a guest and everything is delicate and gorgeous. Wearing my friend’s Adidas pajamas and drinking water and taking Advil in thick blue translucent pill form. Writing down the things I no longer care to reflect on. A lot can happen in a year, I tell Cassandra, but then again, a lot can happen in one day or one hour or one minute, even, so best to be kind of chill about it. We go to Heidelberg for herring and brown bread and hot raspberries in ice cream and apple strudel at night. We go to CVS for baby food and tooth brushes and nicotine gum. The evenings uptown are more sparkling and quiet. Back at the apartment, and I can’t stop talking about all the things I want to do or places I want to move. California, Switzerland, El Salvador. Uptown, to a four bedroom apartment with my four best friends. Lying on Cassandra’s couch wearing a blue sweater under a gray blanket and drinking flower power kombucha this morning. Cassandra gets ready for work and offers general hospitality. Eat any fruits and vegetables you want, Cassandra tells me. She lists them like a game. Ad libs. She was teaching me how to type cast a person as “Lego” or “Dust Bowl” or “Victorian Orphan,” last night. Blueberries, shallots, pickles, seeded mustard from the Amish farm stand. I tell Cassandra that she’ll come home to find I have devoured all of her arugula with my bare hands. Later, I wear Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats and take my own belongings clutched in my arms in a cab downtown. Am I crazy, or did you take my black ballet flats, Cassandra texts, that evening. We discuss an exchange. Tomorrow’s plans. My polyester black gown bartered for Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats. We’ll meet at mass, lunch, The Frick, The Met, the play, the party. The light is blue gray in my apartment, and all the windows steam over when the hot water is on. All the windows steam over because my apartment is very small, and because the bathroom has no doors. A New Year should feel psychedelic, not sluggish, one of my friends said, a few days back. Psychedelic??? I said. What about crisp and clear???? After my dream where there is No Air Left, I come to consciousness with concerns about redemption. Something about bad habits and something omnipresent left unsaid. Sun and light and real sort of detox incoming and yes this has all happened or is happening or needs to happen soon. Sirens outside the foggy window. Gentle winter sunrise. Watching Darling (1965) on my computer as it gets light outside. The Schlesinger film where Julie Christie whirls about all thrilled to find it’s not too late, even though, of course, it is. Back on my phone, I’m checking prediction markets and trackers and fortune tellers and all the things I’m trying to avoid for religious and also paranoid reasons. My fears are all confirmed. Reading the stars. That voice in your head telling you everything will work out fine is wrong, they say. Sound of shattering glass crystallizing outside my open window this morning. I can sense, therefore, more than see, bright morning light starting to seep through. Thank God. It was a few days of gluttony last week. Last days of bohemia, but it was different from the bohemia of before. Different from the times that we were all manic from the wind and cold and early January where everything or nothing happens all at once. Everything used to be reeling. I miss Butterfly Club. Ex-best friends are forever. I’ve been talking about being ascetic for reasons of necessity, and also because simulated intensity can only do so much when it comes to keeping a life pure. Morning, now, and I don’t remember my dreams but I jolted awake ready to chase the same thoughts in circles. Washington Square Park is bright and feeling like spring today, because the snow is melting and the trees and lights are coming down. Pine piles looking a little lonely under the park archway. Something a bit melancholy about it. Dead and gone. Nothing to overthink. Cassandra comes downtown for mass and black ballet flat retrieval, and then she goes uptown to clean her apartment and do good things so she can be a good person. Your apartment is already so clean, I want to tell Cassandra. Cassandra is telling me about the only girl in the world who are funny. I went to tell Cassandra about someone who said me and one other girl and one specific nun are only girls who are funny, but the conversation moves on before I can assert my piece. And I think I’m mostly funny when I’m being mimetic, anyway. Better at knowing funny than at being funny myself. Cassandra is telling me about childlike wonder. Washed my face with La Rouche Possay cleanser and Japanese milk toner and did Big 6 Lymphatic drainage which is supposed to do things like give you the whites of your eyes back and also cleanse your insides through and through, this morning. Procured a Celsius and cool minty zyn from the fridge. Procured green juice and cliff bar and sat in Prada boots, for a while, on the edge of my bed. I do feel confident things will work out in the end, Cassandra texts me. Only if no spiritual blockage with vice or isolation, I text her in response. What if we had seven more hours of daylight, my friend said tonight, but I like it when it is four pm and I’ve completed my day of obligations and the fading daylight matches a sense of completion. I wore a tan skirt with no tights because they all keep running and a black long sleeve tee and sneakers to do venue tours and other obligations. I thought you were coming from the gym when I saw you wearing shorts, my friend said, after I ran into him on the street. I’m not wearing shorts, but I am wearing sneakers because I keep on procuring mysterious injuries, I said in response. It was a strange December and then a good January, incoming. Good, because it is quiet. Good, because I think I sense things picking up. Can I see a menu, I asked the bartender, at a dive bar, later that night. There is no menu, because this is a dive bar, the bartender told me. Can I get something warm, I asked. The bartender fired up the kettle. Imagine seeking out attention to get only the negative aspects of fame like stalkers and rage, my friends were saying, at the dive bar. Imagine selling out your friends to cloy for low hanging fruit. Imagine turning twenty-six. Imagine playing pool. Imagine moving to Los Angeles, California, or San Salvador, El Salvador, or Geneva, or even Austin I would move anywhere, I was saying to my friends. I would move across the country or even the world and become very sweet or even very bored. My friends were talking about people for whom spectacle is just real life. You assume that everyone is excited to go back to real life, and then you realize that they have no real life. So these are the people that you’re supposed to avoid. And then after that, everyone was talking about religion again. Which is sort of crystallizing to be the topic these days, or even this year. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, January 14 A few good downtown art openings tonight (6pm - 9pm) — At 56 Henry; works by Yifan Jiang and Sareh Imani. At Entrance; Seth Cameron’s first New York exhibition in six years. At Post Times; Elberto Muller solo show.
Inline links: 56 Henry, Yifan Jiang, Sareh Imani, Entrance;, Seth Cameron’s, Post Times, Elberto Muller
LOS ANGELES - From 7pm - 9pm — Club Chess presents an evening of chess, wine, and music. DJ sets by A.L. Bahta and friends.
Inline links: Club Chess
LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at The Earl — Matt Weinberger + Echoes + Le Keep present a night of DJ sets and performances: Chloe Cherry Blake The Man 1000 Drake Jazz Brown Emma Burney Le Keep Buff Pons Crooks etc.
Inline links: The Earl
WHAT I DID Monday, January 12 I’m in my room and I’m feeling normal. Outside, the streets are winter-warm. Foggy and sweet. Different from El Salvador, which was humid-sweet. Tropics sweet. El Salvador was learning to understand things and also learning to let the wind blow in interesting directions and also learning to stand on my own two feet. On the flight home, I mapped out every day as a container. At JFK, I decided to treat the city like Vacation. Big Bar every Monday. Museums of Illusions. FDR themed social club. Procure activities on Partiful or Instagram or Yelp or through Word of Mouth. I call Amelia to announce my return and my vacation-forever plans. Is this vacation for the sake of transgression or fun? Amelia asks me. New York is over, Matthew was saying, in El Salvador. New York is over, and Los Angeles is it. I suppose we’ll see, I was saying in response. I suppose we’ll see but for now I’ll take all the energy-whirling-back. The flight home was quiet and late. I sat in the very back row of the plane with lots of water and ambient dread. I dreamt of a rocky landing where Avianca (Boeing 787) (Flight 267) touches ground and then immediately takes back off. I dreamt of being robbed. I dreamt of turning around. Dreamt of being scammed. Dreamt of busy days and busy nights in N.Y.C Back home, tonight, and it’s dinner at Lanterna di Vittoria with my friend whom I like because he offers me generosity kind of liminally. He presents a dangling sort of kindness that I did not have to accept or deny. I could accept his kindness later. I could pluck it from thin air, long after he has walked away. Maybe he is just generally cautious like that, or perhaps he intuits my inherent distaste towards drawing definitive conclusions. He is extremely helpful, but I never say thank you for the advice even though I am thankful. I never acknowledge I agree and I think it is better this way. I’m particularly grateful for the ease of it. He’s happy to know he’s right and also to feel useful without any of the misery that accompanies reliance. The grid is blinking in and out today, and so we are all feeling anxious about nuclear war. You too?? my friend says, when I bring up the topic of nuclear war at dinner. Everyone is becoming so much stupider. Small grid means big problems. I am feeling uneasy, sitting in my apartment tonight, knowing all the best minds in the world are coming up short. Later, cotton candy skies turning dark as we’re walking home. The city is freezing over, and hell along with it. Since I cleared my mind head-empty, I have become so much better at being perfect. Since I became religious, I have become so much faster at driving. Since I started telling all my friends that I want no-trouble, none-of-the-time, everything has started to really spiral out of control. I want to be good, I keep on telling Olivia. We go to the gym together every-other-day. She is the only girl with hair that is longer than mine. You are goodest, Olivia tells me. She says it with a smile, and she is very much not-devious so I believe that she believes this to be true. How many millions of dollars do you think were lost when the grid went down? I ask my friend, walking home in the icy city that I just can’t quit. Trillions, he tells me. What do you mean millions? Jesus Christ. Do you know how the GRID works? He gives me a book. Elephants and economy. Something like that. I already have it. I am smug when I tell him so. They already gave me this book in El Salvador. This book is already mine. The grid has already never-existed. Nothing ever happens. New silk eye mask arrived by mail which means: big sleep incoming. Big sleep in mummy mode. Clean room. Room of a girl who respects herself. Every day is something new. This part has always been obvious. Tuesday, January 13 The air is clear in my apartment, but somehow tinged a little bit blue this morning. Somehow kind of record-stretch hazy, which I suppose is what happens when I am tired and outside, it’s foggy. My friend texted while I slept: I am taking on your mannerisms. Texting back now: I don’t really have mannerisms. I could write a story this morning, but instead, I will write mantras in my mind. It’s good to be quiet It’s important to seize control over myself God gives the world to girls who don’t get in their own way. Black velvet hanger left off kilter. Last night, I purchased a blue dress that reminded me of dreams I already forgot. A blue dress to wear in a glass house in a place like Topanga. Bright blue dress to wear while making spring green soup. Purchased the dress with visions of next summer spinning through my mind. Visions of wearing a blue dress and standing barefoot on the wood floor of my parents’ house and making spring green soup. Sitting on the edge of my bed in dark green lulu lemon leggings and black tank top this morning. Cool minty Zyn in mouth, and Celsius in hand. The apartment is a mess, and it has been for a while. Trees are barren and kind of sweet outside my window. I hate this apartment. I want my old apartment back. I want to get everything I’ve ever wanted. I want to get sober and mean it. I want two hours of dedicated time-writing-fiction per day, and two hours of dedicated time walking outdoors writing notes. I want to let no more hours drift. I was not happy to come back to New York, but I do like the parts of the city that just are-what-they-are. Green turtle pond and freezing hands. Big buildings and tour groups. Windy streets. Bustling with people. When I’m at pilates I don’t feel like I need to move to LA, I tell Saorise, in the studio. The toned and old gay man that owns Pilates People runs warm. He cracked the window to let in the frigid winter fog. All the girls are upset about this. The light is silver and bright like a beam. It is a foggy day. We have LA at home, Saiorse says. We have life-like-California, but it’s real-life and it’s right-here. We can stay right here. We can invent different schools of movement. We can even go to Sugarfish Girls mass-exodus a friend group or even a whole entire life because of totally superficial reasons that are totally fake, Saoirse is saying, at Sugarfish. We acquire Saki. I pull my hair into a tight ponytail and I revel in my perfect day. I document my material reality meticulously. I have been training myself to become totally head empty. I have been training myself to gently accept gluttony, and also to be less subject to my whims. Sugar Fish has the sort of generic-upscale interior that reminds you of nothing, and thus reminds you of personal recollections of positive experiences in similar generic upscale interior restaurants. This is how they keep you coming back, I say. Girls couldn’t find a backbone if it hit them over the head, Saiorse says. Girls want to drown their enemies in buckets like kittens. Girls want to pray for you and ask to kiss you and pretend to be your friends. I am starting to feel some animosity, I tell Saorsie. Our meal is light but comes out in many courses. Saiorse is happy to hear about my budding proclivity for negativity. I’ve been telling you these things for years and knowing that it wasn’t yet time for you to listen, Sairse responds. You can pick something really good, or you can pick something that you really really want. Saiorse plays with her salmon sashimi and she doesn’t like soy sauce. Saoirse doesn’t ask me to tell her which one I pick: really good versus really wanted, that is. Do you remember Michael the explorer, Saoirse asks me. I have known Saoirse for a million billion years. We share a million billion strange friends. It’s nice to pour over these things. Internet friends. Federal agent friends. Friend who snuck over the Canadian border a few years ago and then washed up outside a fire pit in The Hamptons. Her explorer friend who we took to Round Swamp market for blueberry muffins after he got back from some place like Antarctica or maybe North Korea. He was not very risk-adverse. He was so worried about you, Saoirse says. Did you know that at the time? He said you seemed so nice. Walking home in the crisp and cold afternoon feeling so nice. Walking through the farmers market. Curling up in bed half asleep half dressed half under covers. Half lonely and half at peace because I love when my apartment is so cold. Cassandra texts that she is going to the museum. Why, I ask? It is our duty to seek out all the latent beauty in the world. Cassandra responds. At night, In Brooklyn, I can listen to Jeff Buckley Forget Her on repeat and think about what I actually want. Purification. Indulging my addictions. Freedom from vice. Sweet music and soft cover of winter fog and little green glass wind chimes hanging from the trees. I like wearing natural fibers and clothing I move easily in and having a uniform and following an obsession to its logical conclusion. I like knowing immediately and totally what it is that I could or could not love. Little dried leaves shivering across the pavement. They look like little rats except for the part where they are very beautiful. I run into one friend smoking on the street in a velvet black jacket when I arrive at the reading. I like your suit, I say. It’s my only suit, he responds. I don’t want to drink but I do want a cigarette and I only like cigarettes when I’m drinking. There’s a glowing strawberry on the wall, and there are a lot of people I have never seen before or at least do not see often. Like the cool theater kids’ basement in college, the girl next to me is saying. Soft snow flurries outside, which serves as a nice reminder that it is still winter. Reading out loud about Florida, Massachusetts and feeling reclusive. Wednesday, January 14 Sweet Wednesday morning, but I’m going to treat it like a Monday. Still listening to Jeff Bukley Forget Her, which makes me want to be somewhere else. Somewhere very cold or very foggy or even, very sunny. Perhaps I should stop hedging and just commit to something. Last night, a boy was ordering a drink and talking about how he was so glad no one was doing dry January this year. He asked his friend what he was drinking. Soda water and cranberry, the friend said. Oh, he said. You’re doing dry January? I’ve been dry for six months, his friend said. I felt so jealous of his friend. So, I know what has to give. Need to take pleasure in denying myself the things I want, etc etc etc. Listening to Forget Her over and over and over again, and turning my head all the way upside down so I can get a look at the snow behind me, but the snow has mostly stopped. Just silver skies all the way, now. Silver skies all the way up and all the way down. Jeff Buckley died at thirty-years-old. Someone who destroyed himself early but at least he had something to show for it. The desire to toss out everything I own becomes pervasive in the snow. The desire to get rid of all these things I wish were not mine. Gathering up all these clothes and throwing them in a big white trash bag. Thinking about the big smile on my face when my mother gave me a blue and shiny dress and then thinking about throwing it in a donation bin which pipelines to landfills, obviously. Hours can pass, percolating in guilt over what to do with this blue dress among other items. There are many more wasteful things than throwing out a dress. Buying and drinking alcohol for example. Buying and eating protein bars just to feel full by which I mean full of trash. Scrolling on my phone. Being cruel. The snow is both coming down and melting outside. Smells like ski racing. Nothing I am getting rid of is special. If the people whom I don’t want to see show up at a party, then I will leave. My friends are in the basement of the party when I arrive. Another friend’s new bar. The wood has been stained dark brown and the place is starting to look formal and nice. My friends are vacuuming and putting away books. We all look like little elves putting the books away, Quinn says. Many interesting books. Esoterics of Health and something about Aliens, for example. Thursday, January 15 Rinse and repeat. Blueish silver light in my apartment, where the sun barely penetrates, but at least nothing is artificial. Outside, everything is melting, melting, melting. White and chipped paint on the fire escape, and I can see the drops of water growing from the metal edges and then… drop! Leafless trees shimmering like they’re coated in gum drops. Each silver water droplet crystallized as its own little form, and then together, they are turning the whole tree silver. Since they turned down the central heating and then I turned off my air conditioner, a few days ago, everything has begun to feel quite quiet. Should we do a dress exchange? I ask Cassandra. Should I bring you your bible and a book called The Elephant in the Brain and also your blue cashmere sweater in exchange for my polyester Aritzia slip? Yes! says Cassandra. The West Village is wet and cold and the church is white and the doors are blue. The dining room of The Marlton Hotel is full of red velvet booths and gold lined mirrors and star shaped yellow lights. The mirrors and the lights make me feel a little bit like I am in a room full of sun, but I am not in a room full of sun. I am in a windowless hotel lobby full of mirrors. Cassandra takes out her Sunday Riley lipgloss. Girls at table over are taking out their Sunday Riley lipgloss. Girls everywhere are just the same. Olivia has her Rapunzel hair bundled up in her scarf like a baboushka. Cassandra is wearing a beautiful red scarf tied around her neck and wearing beautiful gold jewelry. The girls at the table over are talking about how we were created to have gentle souls. Why would anybody make it their mission in life to seek out… chaos? Cassandra interjects. To seek to degrade others, Olivia says. Cassandra teaches me a new word: Odoriferous. Cassandra tells me about her friend who lives in Northern California off the grid, farming salmon or maybe saving them, researching them, I can’t remember. A girl stumbles into the dining room to greet her friends at the table over. I can feel how cold you are, her friends say. I can’t wait to see the ocean again, Cassandra says. It feels really weird going so long without seeing the ocean. I guess I won’t see the ocean again for a while. Thinking about feeling manic. Thinking about every other timeline. Thinking about pouring big glass of water and black coffee with five splenda because I am still glutenous. Getting right to the cusp of something means that in at least a few other timelines, you probably figured it out. Nice to assume you’re capable of that, at least. Nice to know that in another timeline, my diaries are probably anonymous and I can be less vague. Nice to know that in another timeline I can probably lie. I can probably say what I actually mean. Spraying perfume over green sweater and imagining myself as someone who moves more slowly. Ordered a glass of wine because I love relapsing on an empty stomach. Telling Olivia about when my life was hot and cold and up and down and crazy all the time, because for the first time, I am realizing that she did not know me then. It’s hard to describe to someone who wasn’t there. Feeling a little bit nauseous and like I wish I hadn’t spoken. We could be living in the Midwest driving golf carts, Olivia says. Indiana is just corn and soy but not even produced for human production just animal feed or corn syrup, she says. I have a fondness for cornfields, Cassandra says. We could belong to country clubs, Olivia said. I wonder what that is like. Friday, January 16 In my dreams, I am surrounded by water on all sides, Somewhere in El Salvador. Somewhere in Costa Rica. Somewhere with all my friends-from-the-internet, and they do not like my new boyfriend. It’s ok, because I don’t like my new boyfriend too much either. I am scheming with my internet-friends. We are scheming ways to get rid of new boyfriend. Everyone is happy about my plots to get him gone, and no one seems to clock that I am the one who invited him in the first place. We are deep sea fishing. I am hanging by my arms from the edge of the boat and my feet are running through the water while a girl I know to be my best friend fires up the boat faster and faster and faster. I am a little scared. I am having so much fun. Salt water. Earth water. Angel water. I wake up. One light left on, back in New York. Yellow glowing floor lamp, so at least there’s nothing shining overhead. Last night, I was walking through the winter snow sliding on ice and filled with energy and adoration and also two illicit drinks. Listening to music and wind and stopping for gum and diet coke and then washing up in a restaurant that was bustling and warm and dimly lit. Telling my friends not to wait outside. For a while, I wanted to show others the places that had always been mine. It had never been like that before. It had always been more of a self protective sort of thing. Back to letting myself be dragged to kind of nice places to which I have no attachment, now. Talking about myself like I am playing SIMS at dinner. Ordering one diet coke and one piece of fish. Dinner passing kind of assembly line cool. Chill and smooth. In the snow and the ice, everything is seamless and then I’m in a car home so that I do not slip. Things could be quiet and end early but I still just can’t stay put. I become more full of energy, later on. I have become very sick of interiority. I went to a small Italian cafe to pass the later night because when I don’t, I always wish I did. It was a snowy and beautiful night. The cafe was made for families and locals and tour groups and dark and lovely. My new friends were talking about things like art-of-business, so it felt kind of far from myself but I could bear it for some hours. A beautiful life. Trying to be more tender and less neurotic. This does not have to mean everything. A person can just be cautious and nice-for-now. Walked home in the snow. Woke up warm. Still can’t stay away from places that have always been mine. Yellow light emanates from the yellow lamp. Nothing fluorescent. A million things to write over a million times. A million things to consider. A million topics on which the thing to do now is to wait and see. Waiting and seeing. Text about finding a DJ for a party in San Francisco. Email about a party at The Mount Washington Hotel. All these very random things that feel so close to being in reach. Kind of want to go. Kind of want to languish in old and beautiful rooms at the Mount Washington Hotel and in the majestic magic pool and imagine that money flows like water by which I mean spend money like it is water. Opening the window, now. Letting it be morning, now. Have to be clear, now. Sober minded and clear. Time passes like water, too, so that is something else to be wary of. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, January 27 From 8pm at The River — Theme Trivia returns with Medieval Trivia.
Inline links: The River, Theme Trivia
Feeling like I am kind of on a leash Sunday, February 8 Now, I am in my room and I am feeling ok. I am lying under my big white comforter in a green cashmere sweater, black Amazon tights, tennis skirt, nothing is messy anymore. After today’s reading group, where the discussion was about Virtue and Vice, Cassandra and Olivia and some others and I walked over to Washington Square Diner. I used to frequent Washington Square Diner at night, but in the day everything was brighter and I liked it better this way. I ordered black coffee and lemon tea and was happy with this choice, as no one seemed particularly pleased with the sandwiches that they kept on trotting out. Dry chicken, huge bread. I’m a snob, I’m a snob, Olivia kept saying. Sorry, she was saying. Sorry but I just feel really fucking bored. I added splenda to my water kind of indignantly, and stirred it around feeling strange. Olivia was talking about how it’s fine to eat anything if you’re on a desert island. It’s fine to eat bacon if the desert island is the prison-of-your mind and it’s the-only-food-you-like. Cassandra was talking about how none of her friends were getting married anytime soon, and so perhaps she’d have to conjure up a wedding of her own. Yeah, sorry, I was saying. Why sorry? Cassandra asked. There was way too much food on the table, and I think that this was the part that was throwing off everybody’s vibe. There was a new Cool Sips soda shop where Pepsi is mixed with heavy cream in town, and so after lunch, there was talk of maybe we go. Maybe we go drink heavy cream and diet Pepsi. Maybe we go weightlifting. Maybe we buy cottage cheese which is calories-per-pound-per-protein-per - I never really understood these things - better than chicken. Maybe we all go home. Whilst talking about protein in ground beef and also cottage cheese and also high cholesterol versus heavy metals, Olivia reminded us that the number one health factor is joy. At home, I am sitting on the edge of my bed in a black skirt and Lafayette striped cream sweater and brown snow and salt stained Prada boots. Thinking about self fulfilling prophecies. I will not drink and I will not look particularly pretty and I will not be socially offputting and strange. I don’t need to share every word of my google doc diaries. Twenty-five-thousand words written this week in google doc diaries because I just can’t cut myself off. Real-life-diaries. Real-life-compulsions. Fake-life-blog, maybe. In the afternoon, I walk over to a kind of industrial style Japanese coffee shop to meet Lily for tea. I am wearing a thin spring coat, no gloves, and the wind chill is negative-fifteen. My face is sort of swollen as a product of bad habits, but I am hoping to blame expedited deterioration on wind burn. I run into my priest walking quickly, somewhere around West 4th. Are you crying, my priest shouts in my direction. Just cold, I say in response. I walk for twelve more minutes, and when I reach the Japanese Coffee shop, my hands are burning and there are tears streaming down my face. A product of the cold, no-emotion, I tell Lily. The coffee shop is lined with narrow benches, and Lily lets me occupy the one-free-seat because it is clear that I am feeling fragile. She hovers above me holding silver trays, pistachio milk, black coffee, chocolate chip cookies. I feel like maybe I shouldn’t move to Los Angeles, she sighs, when I finish telling her my week of whirling hotel stories. I feel like in Los Angeles, everyone pretends that they don’t care about nice things. I drink my coffee in a few big sips, and I am feeling better at talking than listening. Did you write anything down about the people my party last week, Lily asks me. I nod, and pull up my notes. Most of my friends call girls ‘girls’ I say, The people at the party called ‘girls’ ‘women.‘ Lily smiles. It’s a posture just the same. At night, at the Superbowl party, in an apartment where the walls were recently washed a sort of deep-cloud blue, and the drinks are made with vodka and coconut water and grapefruit juice and on the side, some champagne, I arrive late. I’ve been making the drinks kind of strong, which I know you like, Savannah says. The advertisements this year are all made by Artificial Intelligence. The only advertisement not visibly made by Artificial Intelligence in an anti-hate ad wherein an antisemitic attack is covered up by a blue square, and two students walk off screen in redeemed solidarity. When this advertisement begins to play, Matt suggests that we all shut up. Everyone watch the ad, he says. The advertisement finishes, and then all the boys’ phones begin to buzz. Did you just see the ad, all the boys’ friends are asking the boys. They are all really into things like hot-ticket-cultural-discourse. What did you do last night? Matt asks me, later after everyone is already all a little drunk, and I am curled up on the couch, eating pistachios, staring at the screen. I hung out with my new friends, I tell Matt. I am feeling triumphant, and a little bit sad. Who are your new friends? Matt asks. Very nice and very promising people, I tell Matt. Don’t tell anyone that I’m making new friends, I tell Matt. I won’t, Matt responds. I won’t, because it doesn’t sound like you are. Later, trying to leave, and everyone is stuck. I think your taxi is blocking mine, Matt texts. I think a cop car is blocking me. Everyone is trying to honk louder than the car before. I was playing tetris in the snow and now we’re playing tetris at the wheel. Tetris on Houston street. My taxi makes a fake-out breakaway left and I speed away. Writing everything down in my apartment, back home. My moods are very predictable. I write about systems. I’m telling my computer that it’s never really about me. Watch how the patterns repeat. Could a human girl be so good at cycles? I’m telling my computer that I’m the best human girl at cycles. I’m the best at downward spirals. I’m the best at it’s happening over and over and over again. I’m not an evil genius. Writing like I’m top-of-class (fifth grade). Writing like I’m queen of staying up late. Window is closed tonight because outside it is just too cold. Drinking Perrier not Evian because I have ambitions of aesthetic cohesion. Dream logic. Magic logic. I am too tired to miss anything, and I am too caught up in self-surveillance to be really running on anything other than vibes. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Sunday, February 15 From 8pm at Night Club 101 — Punisher returns with a post Valentine’s Day debrief. Readings by Megsuperstarprincess, Riley Mac, Nicole Sellew, Francesca D’Alessandro, Dove Ginsburg, and Ava Doorley. Party to follow with The Heaven Forever. Mélange á seven. | RSVP here.
LOS ANGELES - From 6pm - late at Variety Arts Theater — Hard to Read presents a night of artist-led readings, performances, and activities hosted by author Fiona Duncan. Ft Bunny Rogers, Lexee Smith, Harmony Holiday, Maya Martinez, and more. “Interspersed throughout the vast multi-storied labyrinth of Variety Arts Theater, this event infuses the legacies of California performance art, punk music, activism, and socially-engaged literature.” |
Things are becoming interesting again. Themes of my stories include: copying, rage, seven-deadly-sins, homesteading, wyoming, san salvador, lucis trust, morning routine, drinking routine, night time routine, hotel lobbies, five-star-hotels, spirit airlines, palm beach, network states, ballet flats, event calendar, patronage, patronage networks, geneva, venice biannale, canne, party hosting, weight lifting, rock climbing, publicity, st theresa de avila, underwater communication cables, oil rigs, satellites, social clubs, numerology, patterns and symbols, gnosticism, federal agents, effective altruism, rationalism, catholicism, weaponized incompetence, self obsession, self obsession, self obsession, self obsession, disassociation, disembodiment, embodiment, new york city, massachusetts, glass apartments in sky, gray rocky shores, los angeles california, carmel california, san diego california, ventura highway, silver springs, cults, friends, surfing, architecture
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