Manhattan

Article

Manhattan is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 13 times across 13 issues between July 27, 2024 and March 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “walking the perimeter of New York or at least downtown Manhattan”; “seeing the FKA Twigs campaign all over Manhattan”; “In Manhattan, from 7pm at TJ Byrnes”. It most often appears alongside New York, Sovereign House, David.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 13
  • Issue count: 13
  • First seen: July 27, 2024
  • Last seen: March 18, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

July 27, 2024 · Original source
I’m writing again. I’m MAXIMIZING my TIME. I’m walking the perimeter of New York or at least downtown Manhattan but I’m walking it in circles so it counts as more. Dinner at Cafe Hong Kong where two lobsters are $38 and where the walls say RIGIDITY AUTHORITY PRECISION RESTRAINT.
Sunday, August 4 from 2pm - 9pm - Princess Gallery celebrates the new moon, hosted by Tess Manhattan, TrustFundGoth, and more. I believe Princess Gallery is a new space on Henry Street, but specific details are unclear. What we do know: the new moon is “a time for manifesting & shedding what does not serve ??”
September 10, 2024 · Original source
I have my eye on Literary Sport; a new activewear line inspired by poets coming September, 2024. There’s an increasing emphasis on the artistry of the body and the art of fitness in health and wellness branding recently. I honestly think this is a welcome departure from GymShark, QuestBars, GNC, etc… It's long been an aesthetic wasteland for Girls Who Like Splenda. Literary Sport is particularly chic, but I’m also intrigued by David's; a new protein bar brand inspired by Michelangelo’s David that unabashedly promises to make their consumers beautiful. I’ve been seeing the FKA Twigs 'The Body Is Art' Campaign for OnRunning all over Manhattan as well. I might be working on a longer story about this trend, so send me thoughts – chloegpingeon@gmail.com
October 21, 2024 · Original source
In Manhattan, from 7pm at TJ Byrnes — Bronwen Lam and David Dufour present the second PATIO reading. Featuring Harold Rogers, Greta Scheldorn, Thomas Thatcher, Myles Zavelo, Sean Thor Conroe, and Danielle Chelosky.
November 05, 2024 · Original source
I read at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research tonight. Sophia throws a good party. It’s hard to throw a perfect Halloween party. It’s like throwing the perfect holiday party, but even more precise. An endeavor in pure pleasure. I’ve never been to a Halloween party from corporate hell, for example. The BCTR Halloween Party is very perfectly precise. Good costumes (although mine isn’t) a roof that is warm and clear but the breeze is cool and the breeze is bringing in some mist, the breeze is fogging the Manhattan skyline, people are handing out lollipops, someone is doing tarot readings, the costume contest is fun, the costumes are creative enough to merit critique.
From 7pm at Sovereign House — Christopher Zeischegg makes a rare NYC appearance to celebrate the launch of The Magician with a night of alter egos. I recently read and loved this book - “an incantatory trip into the heart of darkness”. Come as you are (or as you are not). Readings by Tess Manhattan, Reuben Dendinger, and Chris Zeischegg. A short film screening of THE MAGICIAN will follow, inspired by the harrowing story behind the text.
To Mark Your Calendar… TENSE is coming to Manhattan on November 15 — For Is That All There Is, I will be reading, along with Lucy Sante, Guy Dess, Beckett Rosset, Adeline Swartzendruber, Mairead Kiernan, and Chris Bray.
November 19, 2024 · Original source
Thursday, November 14 I take the Q to the end of the line today. It's something I've always wanted to do - take the train until the cars stop and I'm the last one left on board and a voice comes on and says please exit the train for cleaning, this is the last stop on this train, please exit the train so the train can be cleaned. I'm in Bay Ridge to shoot a music video today. To be an extra in a music video, that is. I'm exceptionally bad at acting. I'm bad enough that I am even bad as an extra. I'm not particularly bad at lying, but I am bad at having an expressive face. The neighborhood at the end of the Q is nice. I've been taken to other places in New York like this before. Places where you feel like you're by the seaside, where you're under the bridge, where the architecture is more brick, more limestone, more instances of art deco. The Hudson widens into the open ocean somewhere not too far from here and so of course the air feels different. It's strange, even if anticipated, to take the subway ninety minutes to a place where the air feels different, to walk down strange streets and into an unfamiliar gothic building, to open the door to a room where I have never been, and to find it filled with people I mostly already know. The past few years have given me many instances like this. This is something I am very grateful for. The music video is for DDM / Uncensored New York. It's a cool concept. It's cool to watch things come to life. The shoot is outside, and I am the coldest I have ever been. I'm still having fun. I'm thinking about things like how monks orient their consciousness and focus towards the cause of their suffering, and then I am trying to think only about the cold. I am not able to transcend myself, but even freezing, I don't wish I was elsewhere. In the afternoon, I sit in a warm car and I thaw my hands. I have miso soup, tea, and cheese sticks. There is still a chill in me even once inside, which is simultaneously unpleasant and cozy. I'd been wanting a day like this very badly. Friday, November 15 Beckett's Tense comes together with serendipity. There was a crisis with the headliners, Lucy Sante was sick. Beckett ran into Penny Arcade outside of Madame Matovu on 10th. Now, Penny is the headliner. The unsalvageable is always salvaged. The bar can serve real liquor tonight. There's a lot of people here and it's a different crowd than usual. Tense is back in Manhattan. Penny says she’s here because she wants to see what the new New York is doing. I give Beckett a hug at Sovereign House. I say hi to Chris and Adeline. Chris and Adeline are drawing big Tense bubble letters on the chalkboard. The seats are already mostly full. I climb to the top of a ladder and I sit up there. From up there, I have the best view in the house. Tense is not just a reading series, Tense is a show, and this distinction is important. There is a program, an order of events, a flow of new and old. The serendipity with Penny’s arrival lies in this - she seems to understand exactly what Beckett is doing, and while she didn’t write her piece specifically for TENSE (she describes it as “cultural criticism you can dance to”), it speaks with exaction to the spirit of things. Here are some things that Penny Arcade says: I’d rather put a stick in my eye than go somewhere where everyone is the same age. When I was young, if I went to a party and everyone was under thirty I thought... I'm at the wrong party.”
December 03, 2024 · Original source
Florida, Massachusetts WHAT I DID Before I go to Massachusetts, I go to the ExPat Press Party, I go to Holy Cow for fries and grilled chicken, I go home and David makes me pistachio pudding, I wake up, I go on the roof. The roof is all torn up on account of the rain. The railings were lined with little pine trees when we moved in, but the trees have died and we ripped up all the paneling to fix a leak. Now, it's all potholes and fallen brown branches. I'm doing yard work at the top of Manhattan. I can't imagine how I'll ever get the trees back down. Other things: I think I might be thinking about myself too much. At the gym again. In earnest writing things like OUT OF YOUR HEAD INTO YOUR BODY again. What if something drastic happened? I hope it doesn't. Before I go away for Thanksgiving, I go to dinner at Decibel with Madelyn. We go to Pardon My French for a martini. We go to KGB. I go to the Lower East Side, I go to a going away party, I go to the bodega, I go home. At a party in the Lower East Side, a girl is talking about censorship, the age of censorship, how liberated she feels by the passing of This Terrible Era. "So what do you want to say?" Her friend is asking. "What?" the girl says. "What were you waiting to be free to say?" The girl rolls her eyes. "It's the principle" "Yes," her friend is saying. "The principle is important, but you can be free to do whatever you want and still be entirely uninteresting." At a party in the Lower East Side, people are talking about The Internet. "Everything you say is regurgitated from The Internet," the girl is telling her friend. Before I leave New York for only a few days, I go to Franz Kafka at The Morgan Library. It's not a very nice exhibition. They've put pop up walls and bright colors and crowded superfluous exhibition text all over the whole place. I write a review, but then I think it's kind of snarky. It's ok to be mean, but it's not ok to be cheap. "Why are you afraid of being mean," someone asked me a few weeks ago. "Because I don't want to say things that hurt people close to me," I said in response. What I should have said is - because what if I'm mean for nothing? What if I'm mean and I'm wrong and it's cheap. I get a martini at Moynihan Station. David cuts the Amtrak line. “What are they going to do?” he says. This infuriates a woman near us. Afterwards, I think I see this woman everywhere. She's sitting next to me at The Tunnel Cafe. I book a dermatology appointment for when I'm back in New York City. Select any provider, I say. I receive my confirmation email shortly after and I swear to god - the doctor they assigned me is the woman from the train. I cancel the appointment quickly. If this is fate, then it stems from nothing good. God‘s hand has nothing to do with it. Someone is simply playing tricks. the Amtrak Some things that happen in Massachusetts are: I behave very badly. I can't find my keys. It's raining. I can't go outside. I'm in an airbnb where I have never been before and It's so cold and these walls are gray, nothing like home, a lot like the kind of walls that one could imagine closing in. I start shaking by the window and I think about how I could probably be someone who does something like punch a hole through the glass. I wouldn't do this, but it's strange to feel capable of it. I think about how I should probably just go outside. It's objectively strange to spiral. I never crash out. I don't know why gray wall to wall carpeting and people talking too loudly and vicinity to an unknown suburban street freaks me out so much. I wish I could scream at the sky and the rain would stop just like that. I calm down. I don't actually wish I could control the weather. That would be no kind of a life. I go to a hotel I can't afford and I try to break into their gym to use the treadmill. I can't get into the gym, but no one stops me in the lobby. I drink their lemon water. I drink almost the whole pitcher. I call my dad and I say can you please come pick me up now. In a different house, a house that is familiar, a house that I have always known - I sit by the fire, I sit by big glass windows, I watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), I drive to the snow. "I'm driving to Florida to drive to the snow," I say. Welcome to Florida, Massachusetts the sign on turnpike says. It's a white sign flanked by plaster palm trees. A little snowman with yellow hands and feet throws his hands in the air. Troop 76 Pack 76, the sign says. It's a blizzard up the turnpike. It's snowing in thick wet sheets. It's the type of snow that's fast and heavy, almost like rain but it's opaque and it's sticking. Everyone gets out of the car but me. I'm too cold, I say. My sister is throwing snowballs. I get out of the car too. We drive down the mountain. My dad plays Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. We play all twenty-five minutes of it and then we play it again. We pick up David. Do you want to hear Alice's Restaurant?, I ask him. Alice’s Restaurant, Album Cover Things are nice, from here. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, December 3 From 5:30 - 7:30pm at Il Bisonte — Yolo Journal celebrates the new Fall/Winter issue. I love few things more than a beautiful travel journal (something that has become few and far between). Yolo Journal, however, fits this bill to exaction. Wine provided by Franciacorta. RSVP to ilbisonte@novellapagherapr.com
From 11pm - 3am – It’s Techno Night at Old Flings. I go back and forth between enjoying techno and finding it sometimes unbearable. Techno in a small space has a strange appeal, however. This venue is, indeed, a small space. Techno in Manhattan is also a rarity. I’ll probably at least swing by.
December 16, 2024 · Original source
“I find it nostalgic (not the writing or acting but the inevitable contemporary reaction to it) (the writing and acting are sincerely strong - not sentimental). My nostalgia is all my own.” I will publish my review shortly. You can see Dimes Square for the last time ever on Dec 17 and Dec 18 in Manhattan. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, December 16 From 7:30pm — TheaterLab presents the final performance of Tender Napalm – “The New York revival of Philip Ridley’s explosive exploration of love”. I’ve heard really excellent things about this one. Tickets are sold out online, but available on standby.
From 7pm - 10pm in Manhattan — Your last chance ever to see Dimes Square!
February 17, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Saturday, February 15 The cloud cover is interesting today; a translucent gray that stretches on and on and on. There was very little sleep last night: three hours maybe, but now that you are awake, standing on tiptoes on the edge of the bed sorting trinkets into the high up drawers and basking in this silver flickering light, now it feels like it was just enough. David is on the phone downstairs. I can hear the conversation trickling through the walls. "I haven't slept," he is saying. "I'm staying up just to support you, I'm staying up just to support you, I'm staying up just to support you." He says the last part many times, like he's the manic robot of Staying Up Late, or something. There is a sense of delirium in an early morning that follows a late night, but this is not too bad. I was worried, last night, briefly, about the two cocktails at dinner, the sleeping for an hour in the black dress and the makeup, the waking up suddenly, sitting horrified at the kitchen table with dimmed lamps and bright moon, etching out notes on topics like Discipline is Pleasure and My New Routines. I was concerned that sludge proceeds indulgence, but I see now that things remain precise. "I want to hang out with grasping freaks and take them at their word," David is telling his friend on the phone. "I'm going to auction your keys off to an insane man," he is saying. "This is part of my plan to leave it all behind." You don't remember the falling back to sleep, but you do remember waking up again. The cloud cover makes the day difficult to begin, and you do everything a person should do, yes - you pour serums on your skin and drink water and l-theanine and coffee and you go to the gym and you walk at a rapid pace at a steep incline and you walk on the treadmill closest to the sun, although there is not much sun to speak of today. Eventually, you go to the ocean. On the uptown C - I listen to the sort of music I liked in high school and I imagine a day of twirling in the hot summer light and then this cures me. Now, a day of swimming in the cold fog. another day on my lame blog in my lame life. went to a lame party where i had lame conversations and lame drinks. took the lame amtrak back to lame lincoln where there's a lame pony exhibition and a lame pond called walden. now i'm back in lame manhattan. yup.... today is tuesday and it's just as lame as before. i almost go to a lame party tonight, but instead im feeling tired so i spend my lame night in. have you heard about this lame restaurant called the knickerbocker. you can talk about lame things with your lame boyfriend while waiters serve you dishes. This is what it's like to be you, David tells me. There's that Georgia O'Keefe quote - "I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again." It's like this, but I've just been waiting all week. A new week, tomorrow. You will see me tomorrow. I'm looking forward to all of it, then. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, February 17 From 7:15pm at Metrograph — I have evening plans, but if I didn’t, I’d be here watching The Master. One of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s finest.
Betsey Brown is hosting her writers workshop in Manhattan on February 19 to 21 from 10am to - 2pm. This is a magical experience which will teach you how to access both the Truth and the Fiction in your subconscious. I can’t make it this time, but if you can, you must!!
March 12, 2025 · Original source
Tuesday Rules for clarity are: a long walk and methylene blue and if you have vertigo then just go home, because you can’t fight through vertigo, storming through manhattan, all these bright lights will just make you spin. I like alcohol when it is like a potion. You drink an elixir and then things become a bit brighter and more glimmering and shiny and light but, I think how the body reacts to alcohol can be indicators of other things. I’m trying to treat this like a blessing . If I drink alcohol and the potion works opposite and I become sleepy and forlorn and my face turns all red, then it’s like a hack to knowing things about the state of myself. You can know these things by noticing reactions more generally, but I have not been too perceptive. And reactions are only a hack if you act accordingly. I am trying to think of things in very simple terms like, I am reacting to this potion badly these days so, I will try different forms of alchemy, instead. I get to the party early today and the plan is: I will help wash the fruits before the guests arrive. "you going to wash those fucking vegetables or not?" M. says, when I arrive. "very wifey. Is that the most you've ever cooked?" He's right, really. I ordered avocados on this app on my phone right to my doorstep today. You eat foods whole. You try to walk in the sun to collect these ingredients, though it isn't always possible. It really is that simple. Sunday And then, there are other things too. Another party, this one in an Italian restaurant that is far too crowded for the occasion but fun nonetheless. The opera later, the opera this weekend which is good, nice, the set design of the Moby Dick opera is quite impressive but the whole ordeal is a bit much, the ushers and the $27 bad champagne and I was kind of a bitch because David got a double shot of whisky and the opera people thought he said double shot of espresso because who does that at an opera, and then he said no I meant whisky, and then I said oh my god David, in a really bitchy way. Standing in this weird room being weird and judging everyone else. But we stayed for the second act on principle, no one really wanted to, but we can't become people who chug whiskey and leave the opera early. We can't become, in other words, deeply unpleasant people. And it’s deeply pleasant in the morning. And I’ll find myself back at godforsaken KGB Bar in a few days, I presume. I'll find myself back in sparkly sunny strange El Salvador in a week or two. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, March 12 From 6pm - 8pm at Anton Kern Gallery — Love Poems opens; a group exhibition curated by Chris Martin.
From 6pm at Lubov — A 48 hour haircutting event begins. Haircuts offered by over 70 artists, gallerists, designers, musicians (none of them, as far as I know, stylists by trade, so attend at your own risk) - including Annie Armstrong, Emma Stern, Jamian Julian-Villani, Vita Hass, Sam Falb, and more. Organized by Masha Gaze and Timmy Simonds. Music by Gabriel Hollis, Marika Thunder, and more. Readings by Nick Dove, Sierra Armor, Tess Manhattan, and more. A Club Chess popup, screenings, cigarettes, quests (?). There’s too many people involved to list them all, but you have a full weekend to attend and see what you discover for yourself.
April 10, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Thursday, April 3 "The good thing about having a boyfriend who's in a cult," I tell my mother on the phone, "is you can always just go anywhere in the world where there will always just be a strange house full of strange people and you can always just stay a while." "but he's not in a cult," my mother says. She sounds very sincere. "He just works in tech with a lot of digital nomads." "right," I say, which is exactly what someone who was being indoctrinated into a cult would say. I decided to leave again. I couldn’t quiet my mind here. That was a lot of it, at least. And yeah I mean, mostly the thing is I just want to walk and run and write and I think I should learn everything there is to learn about the disciplines that strike me the most. I want to really get into the syntax of it all. Get obsessive compulsive with it. There is the Big Thing I am working on, and I put it aside for a while to deal with triviality. A while being a week, really. The week where I performed at the party, took long walks then dinner then bar then I lent sheets to a friend who forgot to pick up her laundry and then I went to another party, the type of party that I usually would have been so resistant to attend but I went and I liked it this week. They read screenplays aloud the next day and I sat on the roof, I sat in the vintage market, I sat in the restaurant with negronis on tap which felt so foreign to me so Brooklyn instead of Manhattan and I felt pretty proud of myself for staying here all alone, actually. Then, I started dealing in triviality and my sense of pride was replaced with a sense of disgust. It wasn’t so bad. The issue was mostly, just - I couldn’t quiet my mind. But, it’s a sleepy rainy early morning nearing Newark Airport and as I leave, everything is becoming clear again. Like I’ve been so gluttonous - like with money and alcohol and my iPhone and the type of information I give away and the types of things I divulge, like sometimes I divulge a secret before I even know if I mean it, and sometimes I’m awfully quick to indulge myself, honestly, which is a pretty bad sin, one of the worst I think. Seeking: shock value, I guess. It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between Drama and Confession but sometimes you sit in a taxi cab and you draw very clear lines in the sand. I want: bread and water. Very simple things. I want to sit in a quiet room and write a story I am sure is true and if something is only good when diluted by glamor, drinks, you know the sort of things then, well, then I’d like to give it a fucking rest. Friday, April 4 It's been such a haze since arriving in Costa Rica and at first I felt strange about it, like this isn't Good Behavior, treating a Big Trip kind of glibly, feeling a bit pouty and out of sorts and letting myself just be whisked away like it's nothing, when really it's never nothing, when really it's always touch and go and particularly something like this should make me feel ecstatic. Though, I kind of do feel ecstatic. I never really do become jaded. I quantify and calculate it all far too much to take anything for granted. You do kind of feel like you're floating, though. Cold beer to clutch between my knees on the sea plane that starts up all shaky and then scares me less even than a commercial plane because I can see into the cockpit and I can get the sense of how these pilots are navigating this thing. A cloud is just a cloud. I've been using too many words to inadequately explain myself. Send some bizarre texts upon landing that I hope will be encoded with… what, exactly? But, you’re in the jungle when you land. The sea plane slipped over the rainforest and then slipped out to sea, into the clouds. This part made me a bit nervous because there was nothing to spot except the horizon ahead. The scary part didn't last too long. Peninsula de Nicoya. Thick brambled forest by a single black tarmac. David sent me a video when he got here last week. The Jungle, he said, and now it’s like a hologram seeing it here myself. I really wasn’t going to come here. Two A.M. last night and the flights were so cheap that it felt like a glitch or something and then all I had to do was decide, ok, and then everything else was taken care of. There’s a driver at the gate for me. CHLOE, the sign says. That’s me, I say, and I point to the sign. I don’t know why I said it like that. It's a different vibe at the house here than in El Salvador. Surfer spiritualism over techno spiritualism. The aura here makes me feel significantly calmer. Because I am someone who accounts for danger at every turn (neurotic) I can remember being twelve or thirteen somewhere around here, handed a stick to ward off snakes at night, warned that don't you dare touch the frogs, the ants, they told me, fall screeching from the trees and it feels like a bullet wound when they bite you. But, “there is nothing actually scary here,” David’s friend tells me. “The main thing you have to worry about are these.” He shows me a picture of a scorpion. He tells me that the sting hurts a little, but after that the main thing is it makes your body feel all electric. “People sting themselves on purpose to get high,” David’s friends tell me. “They make you high???” I ask. One of the only things that scares me more than getting hurt is getting high. “No, not really,” David’s friend says. When I got here it felt kind of like I’d been teleported. David was there with an ATV where the car dropped me off, up a dirt road, by some stables and then he said - this might scare you but no backseat driving and then we roared up a mountain, nighttime already, I was left in a room in the hills in the jungle alone while the others offroad up and down and up and down until everyone was here for dinner. You can see the stars in a way that is so special here. I’d been told about this part, but it’s better to see for yourself. You couldn’t make out what parts were ocean and what parts were horizon but you could see that the darkness was placid and lovely and it stretched out quite some ways. You could see where there were villages, because lights close to the ground edged up against the stars in the sky but lacking any visual markers to ground them, these villages appeared to be hovering, unmoored. “You’ll be able to see the ocean in the morning,” David told me. So, in the morning, I thought, I will be able to distinguish which parts are ocean, and which parts are sky. Saturday, April 5 In the morning, there is a gecko on the ceiling and a dog outside my door. Chat GPT got way better overnight, I am told. It’s harder for me to suss out the vibe here. They are bullish on AI, but they are hesitant about some of the other stuff. We’re not really doing much of the hacker house stuff anyways, this time, though. Back down the mountain, and we’re in a hotel, and there’s surfer girls with pretty hair in pretty dresses dancing barefoot in all the nightclubs here. The heat makes a run in the morning unbearable. Even the walk to the shop is heavy and thick but I don't mind this. The only thing I do every single morning is walk for an hour and write while I walk, but the heat makes this hard. It's ok, because I can float instead. Yerba mate and corona extra and white claw and paloma in a can and redbull green and coconut water all stacked side by side in the shop, but I leave empty handed. Before, we got cold brew mixed with orange juice and a cashew avocado tart at a cafe run by the girlfriend of one of David’s friends. Since I tried it out and basically just became an alcoholic bartending my way around Eastern Europe at eighteen, I have kind of found the whole nomad thing to be spiritually ugly. Like it's something for mid thirties men that look older from the partying who stop you in back alleys in Croatia and tell you things like the key to it all is to never buy a couch. And they would say it like you were supposed to really get it. And you did get it, you got what they meant by it at least, but the thought was just a bit half baked and unconvincing. Ok, so, I wouldn't buy a couch but then what? Then what would I do? What should I do? I didn't want to stay listless and skimming the surface forever. New York is kind of empty too when you aren't living at least a little bit gently, and so these are the different pieces I am trying to parse out. I would stay here for a while with a project. David drops a chip on the beach lined with hermit crabs and he creates this huge commotion. Anarchy, really. All the little crabs begin to rip each other to shreds. "I hope the big one comes in and destroys them all," David says, regarding the hermit crab pile-on situation. There's not really any metaphor here, he’s just being vaguely sadistic. It does happen as you would expect. One big hermit crab sees its opportunity, identifies his leg up in this whole situation or perhaps, they aren't the brightest creatures, perhaps it just wants to try its lot at the prize like all the others and is surprised to find itself emerge victorious. He makes a clean break with the chip down the beach. The crabs kind of look like spiders from my vantage point. A mass of little tendrils for legs chasing after someone six times their size. They all have the death drive, because when they do catch up, it's not good news for any animal involved. An underdog swoops in and gets the chip. I don't know, I lose sight of it all. You have a target on your back when carrying the bounty though. If I was a hermit crab, I wouldn’t risk it. I put my head underwater in the ocean to get myself sorted. I walk back through a little bit of jungle and then past the fishermen in Malpaís while David turns around the ATV. Soles of my shoes are all sticky on the pavement. Herd of goats in the road. The heat makes all my thoughts become all slippery and smooth. If I spent a month here, I could learn how to become all tan and bendy and strong. Sometimes, I become slippery and smooth. I could spend the first part of my month learning how to notice when my mind becomes like this, and I could spend the second part learning how to make the feeling last. I would stay here for a while with a project… WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, April 10 From 6pm - 8pm at Blade Study — Clare Koury presents the opening of solo exhibition Scaling Laws For An Open EnTrainment Structure. With this installation, Clare Koury is addressing the part of the color spectrum that eyes don’t see.
September 09, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 1 On the train to Coney Island, my friends are talking about the motifs that keep occurring. It's the sort of thing that happens to you when you have a pure heart, one of my friends is explaining. It's the sort of thing that people try to do to Real Life Angels, my other friend is explaining. Real life angels aren't real, I am saying, though I understand her point. The train is streaking through open air with towns on both sides. Housing projects rising up beyond that. Fallen green leaves and gray pebbles on the edges of the tracks. I have had these concepts of destruction explained to me before, only then it was by my mother or my friends in Miami and they called it Evil Eye. Here, they call it Devils and Angels. Real life Demons. I have been spending a lot of time this summer, trying to parse out the difference. Later, we emerge onto the boardwalk to find Curtis Sliwa in his red barret at the edge of the Atlantic. Police officers and children and men with snake tattoos in the ocean. There is live music at Salt and Sizzle and a ferris wheel that is one-hundred-years-old-and-never-any-accidents and the sky turns blue and purple and they cancelled the fireworks last year on account of someone drowning and due respect. We miss them this year of our own accord. When I was in love I spent a lot of time thinking about the apocalypse and feeling kind of giddy and aloof in this anticipation, convinced that the best way to die was euphoria and so end times while the center held would be a relief above all. When I smoked cigarettes and was a teen I would spend a lot of time pondering pop-psychology notions of optimistic nihilism and watching reddit atheists evangelize online. Now, I'm on the F-train back towards block-party-bars and my friends are shooting photos of their merch line, standing in front of the train doors as they open and close and I prefer to stay seated. Mostly aware of how dehydrated I am, which is a relief insofar as it diminishes all less corporeal thoughts. At Time Again, we make new friends with rare and inquisitive souls, which is really what the end of summer is all about. Writing on my phone on the walk home. Scribbling with kind of blurry eyes like an ipad baby on Delancey Street about the things that one has left to lose. Scribbling kind of incoherently about Health and Strong and Pervasive Senses. Scribbling Mother Teresa’s Rules For Humility. Speak as little as possible of oneself and Yield in discussion even though one is right and; well - what else am I supposed to do besides accept and embrace a Strong and Pervasive sense that things are as they are? Things were one way and now they are another. Things are harsher now in some ways, and more gentle in others. Tuesday, September 2 Woke up feeling very concerned about the decay of my physical form as a result of my bad habits and also by my newfound sense of passivity which I hope is driven by surrender and not by cynicism but one can really not be too sure. Woke up to a brand new delusion. In my dreams, someone was knocking on the door. They woke me up screaming. I stayed very quiet in response. Sunlight through my windows that I cannot bring myself to drape with curtains. Looked through the peephole. No one was there. Here are things I need to do: email the priests at Saint Joseph's to join OCIA and consider becoming Catholic despite my generally waspy sensibility. Finish and publish my substack. Create publicity materials for the play, go to class tomorrow, go to screening at Anthology Film tomorrow, write write write. Conjure up some sort of novel-like plot out of my hundreds of thousands of words of musings I keep in secret online documents. Make final edits on El Salvador piece and hope for the best. Conjure up some sort of plausible plot for my novel about gnosticism and also schizophrenia in people who seek to approximate the feeling of being famous by having friends online. Drop off laundry. Workout a lot. Maybe go sober. Certainly be sober-for-today. Today I am Cleansing. Today I am proud of myself in some ways and disappointed in others. Over plates of octopus and shrimp in lemon mustard sauce and pita and eggplant dip, Iris asks if she can treat me. Treat me to what, I asked. Do treatments for you, Iris explains. Treat me with iodine and thyroid and hypnosis. Treat me with methods opposite to my own. My own being mostly, a hysterical dipping in and out of notions of asceticism. Ok to some treatment, I say. Iris and I walk to the shops. The sky is still light but it is getting colder now. Iris buys dish soap and I slip sea kelp spray into my pocket. I have become quite destabilized by my afternoon visit to the glass apartment in the sky with the revolving doors. Not my apartment. No one's apartment. I am less like an orphan now. Iris and I walk back outside and down towards Seward Park. Iris says Sam knows a good aura cleanser. Not that I think the aura in the glass apartment in the sky is necessarily dark or doomed, Iris clarifies. I’d been telling Iris about some theories on the aura of things as dark and doomed. An invisible string but it was most of all bad. Ultimatums of gnosticism but they were delivered with nefarious intent.. Narcissistic to assume spiritual implications in the everyday, obviously. But how does one explain why they feel like they are floating by the time they are drifting up the stairs? On the Internet, they are making up real life retreats to enter the void. On the internet, they will take you to the Real Life House where you can Understand Real Life Consciousness. On the Internet, you can't live forever. Everyone realized that a few years back and I realized too, a few years after that. In Real Life you can maybe live forever, though. Everyone hopes so. I have been worrying, lately, that I hope so too. Wednesday, September 3 It’s Art Week in New York, which means less to me than it used to, besides for a pleasant rise in energies and things whirling back to life. I go to the first installment of the Marjorie Cameron series at Anthology Film Archive on account of Emillia’s recommendation and a slightly uneasy interest in the occult, tonight. An interest in witches who used to dance in a ring of rocking horses by my childhood home and a drive through Lily Dale with Riley in other lives, a few lives before this one. All that greenery and a long road alongside a lake towards the Psychic Capital Of The World. Hub of Mediums. Salmon Rushdie had been stabbed nearby a few years back. A psychic in Rhode Island had told me things would happen as I wanted them too but it would be first a thing of waiting, and secondly a thing of new architectures and spaces given that I’d been dealing in impossible conditions for awhile. Trying to make something stick in an Architecture of Unhappiness for a while. I stayed up til dawn over the weekend. Awoken to a Providence necklace placed around my neck and a burning desire to remove myself from the organ donor registry just in case. I worried about the morality of seeking loopholes as it pertained to the Providence Necklace, but a few days have passed and now it is Wednesday, early evening, tuck the tag under the collar of my shirt and began my hovering walk towards things that happen. The screening shows a Curtis Harrington film called Night Tide (1961), and it is about a girl who is a siren or perhaps it is just about Psychological Warfare, the ending leaves things a bit unclear. I've been nostalgic for the kind of California where I've never really been before. Nostalgic for things that never happened which I think is less a thing of clairvoyance and more a sense of how it all slips away but regardless; the shots are all of witchy Venice Beach and an apartment over the carousel that overlooks the sea and there is a bonfire on the rocks and some dancing that becomes a bit possessed due to dark forces - pulling my hair over my eyes like a blindfold for these parts - but I am thinking I could live in a place like this in spite of perhaps some evil. I have always thought I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in this way Thursday, September 4 Last night, I turned off the air conditioning and spilled Diet Pepsi on the baby pink rug in my sleep. Mom has shipped out baby blue curtains with white stripes and New York (the place where all my problems are) is starting to become a place that oscillates into something more calm. Sophie suggested baby pink curtains, and so I am making compromises in my mind. Compromising my own opinions and the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in things improving drastically through the help of water in glass bottles and red light therapy and self hypnosis and religious conversion and swapping out the Cool White Linear Fluorescent Light Bulbs for something warmer. Everything becomes warm and still and the air is kind of heavy. I can lie very still for a while. Not forever, but definitely for now. You should just become one of those sociopathic writers who does insane things for the sake of writing, Iris advised me a few days ago. Yeah, I said. Like go to consciousness school in Argentina or conduct strange experiments with materiality on myself and others. Adopt a regiment of strange injections or move to Venice Beach to become Catholic and fight the occult there, too. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New World in New York City. Closing my eyes and imagining Venice Beach as a magical little enclave with a witchy apartment over the carousel by the sea and arched doorways and conch shells and a jazz club and massage parlors and psychics on the piers. If I became a ruthless psychopath, what could I do in a place like this? In New York City (the city built on crystals). I am not feeling so ruthless. Self-experimentation without self-possession mostly leading towards destruction of a pretty boring variety. At least we don't live boring lives, I used to be told. There is nothing more boring than this, I used to say in response. Friday, September 5 Come in, come in, three psychics beckon on Sullivan Street, but I am pretty clear about how things have been and where they are going, and I would prefer to look for motifs in patterns and symbols and psychosomatic symptoms which reach a peak and then; abandon your whole entire life. That is one thing the psychics could tell me to do. Abandon your whole entire life. They could tell me to buy a whole new personality. I could buy a good fortune swimming in tea leaves and an aura cleansing from the psychics on Sullivan Street. I could buy a membership to witchcraft school and a flat in Venice Beach and a conflicted conscience when it comes to forces of good and evil and certainly, to things like health, sobriety, longevity. It's enticing to create pseudo intellectual or pseudo spiritual explanations for bad behavior when in reality things are obviously much more simple. Most actions are much too plain to qualify as any sort of performance or definitely any art. I'm working on becoming stupider, I told Iris. Will I become stupider? I asked the psychics. Will the apocalypse come sooner or later if the collective consciousness ideates on it or tries to stave it off? Is it better to be witchy but self protective, or ascetic but operating with self abandon. Where can one buy self possession? Taking the C-Train to Fort Greene Summer Fairyland where my dad and Sylvie wait for me at Aita and so everything is better. Plums and peaches and ricotta and octopus which the girls behind us are saying they don't eat after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020). Girls love to say they don't eat octopus after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020) but perhaps I am heartless, and I mostly just found the documentarian in that film to be kind of deranged and unreliable. Beef tartar and potato chips and Sylvie is talking about how she's aware of the balance of power in every single conversation and I'm saying I'm literally never aware of that I'm literally always just seeking equilibrium in any interaction that matters because conversation exists to reach understanding and Sylvie is saying no you are just always making sure that you are the one with the power in every conversation. I say no and she says yes and I say can we seek some equilibrium and she says you make sure that won't ever happen. The combat stops. My dad is asking Sylvie's boyfriend why he seeks intellectual inquiry. Sylvie's boyfriend is pointing out the famous people peppered around the bar. Goodbye you power hungry beast, I am telling Sylvie. My dad drives me back towards Manhattan. Animal skulls are scattered around his mini van and he says I can have a deer jaw for my new place if I want. Wrong turn through the Hubert Tunnel. Twenty-two dollar toll. Drop me off at the most Satanic Nightclub in New York to sulk soberly at the edge of an indoor pool and really lean into nihilism insofar as - what if we stayed for a while? I don't stay for a while. Manhattan night is teeming with people and the city is built on crystals. Good or bad ones? I haven't decided yet. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, September 9 From 7pm - 11pm at Night Club 101 — AltCitizen 15 Year Anniversary Show series launches with The Kickoff. Hosted by Brittany Marino. Featuring Lulu Van Trapp, Suo, D. Treuit. From 10pm - late, after party downstairs | Tickets: $15 advance, $20 doors
October 06, 2025 · Original source
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.
March 18, 2026 · Original source
MANHATTAN: From 7:30pm at Night Club 101 — Lubov says THE INTERNET MADE ME DO IT. A night of readings and music with Ada Donnelly, Alex Bienstock, Marble Index, Kyle Sullivan Dobbs, Lorry Kikta, Melissa Seward, Angel Money, and Yuri NYC. | RSVP here