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Midtown

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Midtown

Article

Midtown is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 19, 2024 and December 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I’m working at a magazine cocktail in Midtown and then I’m staying in Midtown”; “catch the train towards midtown towards Bartending School”; “It was not quite midtown in Winter”. It most often appears alongside Celia, New York, Night Club 101.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: May 19, 2024
  • Last seen: December 22, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

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

COLLECTED AGENDA #1
May 19, 2024 · Original source
l’m working at a magazine cocktail in Midtown and then I’m staying in Midtown to go to Townhouse for one drink and then I’m late to the EGirl Zine Launch so I’m taking a taxi (yellow cab) downtown. I’m morose at the function (tired, maybe disassociated) so I’m not talking, I’m reading! I’m reading the EGirl Zine on the floor. Zines are always bad, but the EGirl Zine is good! After, I go to a birthday party and then I realize I lost my wallet and so then I uber home and make one chicken sausage. Learning to COOK and learning responsibility (badly)
Inline links: Townhouse, EGirl Zine
Drinking Dreams
September 04, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, August 24 Lay with filthy tangled hair hanging off the edge of the roof for a while last night, watching the Chase Clock Tower lit up too royal blue and the Empire State Building lit up the nicer sort of baby blue. I've been collecting shades of blue. Kind of navy blue Frankie's Bikini little number reflecting something sort of aqua off my Diet Pepsi on the D-line towards Coney Island. Screaming children on the D-line. Naked man running around trying to steal pedestrians pants on Coney Island. He keeps on saying to the other guy, Darby says - “I like those pants ! Gimme those pants!” And it was all these beautiful friends coming and going last night. Coming and going until it was late, really late, so taxi home and then I ate the toppings off a slice of pizza on the floor with a spoon. I spent the morning alone doing Rituals. Tretinoin before sleep and I did wake up screaming for the first time in a while. Red light therapy and copper multi peptides and avocado eye cream and mineral sunscreen and now I'm on the Subway. Kind of braindead on the subway. It sometimes takes it out of you. This sort of thing can really take it out of you. It's been summer for forever, now. I have a lot more friends now. Connectivity, connected tissue, I walk down Brighton Beach by myself, walk to Tashkent Supermarket for a towel and carrot salad and on the phone I'm saying it is not that I wish for death and even sometimes I fear it but things have become a lot less Risk Averse. I'm a lot less Risk Averse now. It would be better to be dead, someone was saying at the bar last night. She was looking at me eyes all intense and no one was really listening, I could tell no one was really listening but everyone was watching her all the same and I could see them all clenching their bodies and kind of pulling away.. Me particularly, pulling away. Perhaps I'm being self absorbed. It wouldn't be better to be dead, someone else said. He looked at me then, locked eyes which usually makes me kind of uncomfortable but I felt inclined to agree. It's definitely better when nobody is dead, I said. The bar was full of plants and glass. Like a glass jungle, I told my nameless friends at the bar.. That's not very astute, a nameless friend told me. Tonight, the cocktail menu is flavored and priced like a full course meal, and so tonight I order Cold Pizza for dinner. Cold Pizza in a crisp glass bottle, plus greasy fried chicken after that, which comes in thick paper cups. And everyone is so grateful to be alive, tonight. Everyone is so grateful for one more year of life for themselves and for their dear friends particularly. Purple sunrise if I hadn't slept through it. Yellow sunset if I hadn't gritted my teeth and clenched my eyes shut through it. Planted two feet firmly in the ground and screamed through it. First, I made one thousand promises I couldn't keep. Second, I sat on the stoop with an energy drink, water, cool minty menthol gum and the antiseptic kind of sore throat with some bodega spray gripped tight in my hand to heal all my problems. My ailments and the other things. My organs and my mind. Overjoyed to be alive again after leaving my apartment, I told Amelia. It does make things better again, Amelia told me. Tuesday, August 25 Bartending school feels kind of like an alcoholic's vision of a drinking dream. Like holograms of condensation, dim lighting, one takes a sip to the tune of disappointment. Water and food coloring dye. Bowery Park and Whole Foods and JPress nearby and inside; Christmas is coming. Smooth jazz. Everything has felt a bit the same for a time, but my room is clean. Summer is passing. Three months is not so long. Would a functional alcoholic lace up black ankle boots at seven in the morning with a clear mind and bright eyes to catch the train towards midtown towards Bartending School, at the top of the week, at the tail end of August? I am not so good at pretending like anything is changing. Like habits stack towards something greater. It might as well be yesterday, I sigh on the phone. For you, it might as well be yesterday, Amelia agrees. I do the things a person should. Cake for friends' birthdays and the waiter keeps stacking on fees at Union Square Cafe. Cut the cake fee, sit at the table fee, big group of people fee, bring your own food fee. There are other tables next to us all inhabited by people who all appear to be exactly the same, though perhaps I am being uncharitable. Imagine them as skeletons. Imagine them as children. My parents used to tell me this when I was little. Kind of a hack against boredom. I imagine myself as a psychic, looking out on things overpriced and people all exactly the same. You will have a small child and feed her nothing but buttered noodles. You will advance in age but stay exactly the same through invasive surgical facial intervention and stunted social development. You will spend evenings eating french fries with caviar for One Hundred Dollars despite a rich inner world and a childhood pumped full of extracurricular stimulation designed, specifically, to avoid a fate like this. You will fear God more than death and you will understand self destruction to be akin to suicide hence rendering you too, on a trajectory like this, a rather hellish creature. You will wake up in the middle of the night in a small box criss-crossed wood roof apartment in New York City to the sense that there are No Loopholes Left. You will go to bartending school. You will recognize that, while you can be cruel there were other factors at play. There were worse factors at play. Wednesday, August 26 Walking from Greenwich Village to Long Meadow in Prospect Park with a bag filled up with white linen and Thomas Pynchon and a plan to celebrate sweet Sylvie's birthday. A different sort of nostalgia in the air today. Nostalgia of all sorts being kind of a form of mental illness, of course but once - we were woodland fairies. Once, there were fall morning running races and cranberries that crunched under bare feet on Massachusetts roads. Once, there were rounds of Tom Collins in a kind of jazzy jungle garden restaurant in the tropics that my boyfriend who liked gender-roles enjoyed because they wouldn't let girls order their own drinks. Once, I went to the Yankees game in late August, blue and pink hazy skies, the sort of advertisements that blare out notes about Fast Food and Safe Driving in the stadium, and the sort of crowd that is so big it starts inspiring feelings of Life and Spirit rather than Homogoninity and Dread. Once, I walked from bartending school full of Tom Collins, Chambord, a sip of walnut martinini, frangelico liquor. Walked to Caffe Reggio for egg white omelet, toast, a creamy cannoli. Walking to Prospect Park a little bit tipsy. Thinking about the sort of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing about the sorts of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing it all down. Writing and walking. Writing it everywhere. Writing it on the walls. Though, I'm not so bad at keeping secrets anymore. Thursday, August 27 Amelia and I sat at Caffe Reggio until close last night, and now I have returned. Tomato soup and side grilled chicken and creamy cannoli and mint tea because things feel decadent again. Limited consumption. I haven’t really been limiting consumption. The waitress is complimenting the gray sweatpants on the boys at the table over from me, and the waitress seems to be vaguely annoyed with me, though I am trying to be pleasant. Thanks the sweatpants cost enough, the boys are saying, at the table over. Thanks we didn't realize we couldn't split the bill, Amelia and I were saying, last night, our tea was four dollars total and everything was starting to feel a little bit hazy. Sitting on the floor at sunrise, this morning, Amelia and I were watching videos from Miami. Videos from Bahamas. Videos from New York City, 2022, we'd been at all the same parties, but I hadn't known a soul. BAHAMAS, we are beaming, in one video, in the back of a taxi cab, streaking over MacArthur Causeway, Miami-Dade County, Florida, and so, as I recall, the driver was confused. I'm putting on makeup in the photo booth webcam on the floor of a hotel room and Amelia is talking in the background. It's Opposite Day in the background. Who had a mental breakdown, someone is saying in the background. From an outsider's perspective, who was it who had a mental breakdown? Friday, August 28 6:30pm, and I am back at IFC for my third viewing of Diva (1981) in twenty-four hours. I came to view Diva (1981) for the third time in twenty-four hours, because I became very sick of thinking about myself. This is a desirable alternative. The film is beautiful, and I wish to live in places like the apartments pictured. A large and wrecked studio in a car park with painted walls and recording equipment or, a hotel in Paris or, a castle by the sea or, the best one of all is a large blue flat full of puzzles and high ceilings and echoing sea sounds and an aqua glow and a man who wants to learn to stop the waves. They are fighting crime in the film. They are entrapping the criminals and they are doing it kind of like performance art. I don’t wish to spoil the ending. It really is the perfect little film. So; I will send out the recipe for zucchini (courgette) soup, and I will explain away the things I did in breathless optimism as things I did while bored. I will go to The Scratcher, Killarney Rose, Funny Bar, then Gospel then Caffe Reggio again - these are the decadent places to which I continue to return. I will draw my name with Riley on the table in crayon writing Best Friends Forever and listen to Feryquitous ft Sennzai and Sigur Rós and John Maus and think about Switzerland, Iceland, having a lot of dreams about places that are lush, lush, lush. Thinking about places that are quiet quiet quiet. Thinking about places that are green green green. Feels like Fall, outside, after church. Amelia woke me up in a living room that looked like a library and she was screaming that the air was poison. I was difficult to awaken, because it is my own delusions of poison air that wake me up screaming on other nights. Different from tonight. I was reminding myself of reality. I was reminding myself of delusions and keeping my eyes clenched shut while Amelia screamed. Well, the air wasn’t poison after all, just late night and late august and heavy with mosquitos and dust from renovations and revelations and; we walked back to the cafe. I walked through Washington Square Park at dawn. The doorman wished me good night at seven in the morning and the cycles repeated. It isn’t opposite day and we aren’t in hell, just working on things like bed time and emotional regulation. Working on archiving the things that happen outside of my head. It becomes good to have been an archivist all along. It becomes good to become sick of dealing with things mainly in repetition. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, September 4 From 6pm at Carinito — Saloon is throwing a party. Drinks from Dio. Dancing, DJ, tacos, etc
Inline links: Carinito, Saloon, throwing a party
One Million Billion Interludes
November 27, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, November 17 After the summer passed and I started fresh one million billion times and nothing really happened all autumn which is always how it kind of goes this time of year, I realized I’d been trying to be a bit too ethereal about it. There were certain ways I actually spent my days, after all. One tried to become more private, and instead, one started to simply become a bit obtuse. On Saturday, Lily invited me to the Philharmonic with friends, for example. Composed and conducted by John Adams to create “jazz-inflected take on film noir’s gritty sound world” as well as “a tribute to the Northern California coastline.” This was nice, because everything I’d been imagining for months now was all misty shores and temperate gray climates and so it was nice to hear the music and imagine kind of floating in that. Sat there kind of ignorant about it all, but liking the ideas that form in one’s subconscious in conjunction to classical music and the high ceilings and fancy rooms and watching the conductor move like a marionette. That was like drugs, Lily said, after. Phillip Glass was seated a few seats over the last time we were here, my new friends said, before. It was not quite midtown in Winter but Lincoln Center was still starting to glow, what with the horses and the Christmas trees and an older demographic of opera and film and philharmonic-goers all dressed up. Negronis in sippy-cups and vodka at the Russian Tea Room, and Lily’s artist boss had dressed her for the occasion and so she looked kind of sparkling in a long green skirt and a wool coat with a shoulder-hook for her purse. You look like a martini, I told Lily. I wore tights from the Internet and a dress from my ex-roomate and a falling-apart-purse from my ex-boyfriend and black shoes from my mother. You look like a whiteclaw, Lily told me, but she said it very kindly and so I didn’t take offense. After, our new friends showed us the lines in the road where the horse manure and hay had become indented to permanence, and they showed us a fountain where once an old woman was seen wrangling snakes, and they showed us an apple store they’d robbed, and they assisted the blind. We followed the blind man onto the subway and then later I was at downtown bars where it’s the same thing over and over again. Matt and Matt perched in the corridor by the bathroom. Ran into a friend fresh off of working a Palantir-Party. It could have been so good in theory, she explained. They’d rented out multiple bars and catered Carbone and a martini tower, after all. But the dry ice was kind of glitching and San Francisco people all wear aura rings even on nights-out and on the bright side, they left behind thousands and thousands of dollars in parmesan cheese. What else? Two dresses arrived in the night from resale Cinq de Sept and Gil Rodriguez and I laid them out on my perfectly made bed all black and christmas white. I wrote a small review about a book about a girl who idolizes the apocalypse because she does not desire to get old. I was paralyzed, for a while, which come to think of it, was what stirred all that talk about momentum. For breakfast, I am served a rotten egg at the gym on Prince Street. It emerges in a plastic cup and it is sheened in dark brown sludge. This egg is rotten, I cautiously tell the man who is working behind the counter. Oh, the man says, and then he opens his palms like he hopes for me to place the plastic box and rotting egg in them. We both seem unsure of what to do. Oh I’m sorry, he says. It’s ok, I say. And then he hands me a barbell bar in response. Like we are doing barter and trade. Cassandra tells me a story about one of her favorite days of her life. We were all on the peninsula for the week, by the ocean, in the room with the big wooden bed and the canopy curtains and the patchwork quilts. We let Cassandra and Celia in around mid afternoon, and we were all watching the boats float by on the window. And I was doing a rubix cube, Cassandra says. And you were getting so mad. And the day went on forever, I tell Cassandra Not forever, Cassandra says. I do remember writing down everything everyone said, though. Now, everything hovering hovering hovering. New Moon, tomorrow. Grab all that crisp and frozen air that’s hovering so thin it could snap, and maybe it will. November snaps in half and all the other omens and things-that-could-happen come spilling out. All because of the New Moon. All because of the artificial intelligence apocalypse. All because I’m reading the book that Alice Bailey’s demon wrote. Not to get too new age about it... WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, November 26 From 7:00 - 9:00pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Hillsdale opened yesterday, and there’s another performance tonight! A play written by Roman D’Ambrosio and directed by Rabiah Rowther. “During homecoming weekend at the infamous conservative Hillsdale College, former fraternity brothers, and the women they love, reunite. As the weekend unfolds and the drinking increases, the alumni question their relationship with each other and the promises they were told. | This is a very unique play that I’m excited about. Definitely worth seeing. tickets here (additional performances Nov 28
Inline links: The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Hillsdale, Roman D’Ambrosio, Rabiah Rowther, here
Hotel Lobby Gossip
December 09, 2025 · Original source
Many things I miss and many things I don’t Friday, December 5 All my friends think different things and want, for the most part, the same things. I try to teach Celia about adaptability, but she doesn’t like bossy people, and she doesn’t like it when I try to teach her anything at all. Anyways, it’s all been a more interior sort of thing. Alice-Bailey-The-Mystic is one crazy chica, but she does have some interesting things to say. On her enemies - “they have done me no real harm, perhaps because I could never dislike them and could always understand why they disliked me.” On thinking about yourself too much - “people’s profound interest in themselves and in their souls and all the intricacies of related experiences almost staggers me. I want to shake them and say, ‘Come outside and find your soul in other people and so discover your own.’” In the evening, I walk to the first Christmas Party of the season, through the Washington Square Park archway that is lit up silver and glowing and then to an office in midtown with pine branches and lights that are warm and shimmering and then to the East Village, where the party feels like something from 2022. Something where everyone gets too drunk and asks you about your thoughts on technology and art and you respond with something like: oh I just moved here. Except I didn’t just move here, and so the party feels kind of nostalgic, too. Only one note from the afterparty. I wrote it on my phone, and I really hope it’s true. THEY’RE SAYING I’M NOT EVIL Phew. What a relief. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, December 9 From 7pm at EARTH — Open Secret presents An Evening of Internet Cinema with Dana Dawud, Redacted Cut, Poorspigga, Zarina Nares, Carmen Llin, Onty, and Araya.
Inline links: EARTH, Open Secret, An Evening of Internet Cinema
The social experiment is now over
December 22, 2025 · Original source
One life all at once Friday, December 19 The West Side Highway is cold and clear and empty driving home, like everyone is already gone and this night will be the last dredges of things as they were. The taxi driver is playing soft rock and the barges on the Hudson look like little houses from a distance. New York in December is like a fairytale, because most everyone leaves for real life and then you are reminded, in the lost week of the year, that none of this was ever exactly real life. There’s a red sports car doing donuts in the empty lot of Pier 76. There are three American flags blowing in the wind. Every December feels almost inconceivably distant from the one before. It’s been this way for a few years, at least, now. Mostly, this makes me feel self satisfied, and sometimes, this makes me feel sick. The wind has been crazy the past few days. It’s like a wind tunnel, specifically, driving through midtown. The river is churning. The wind is making everyone insane. I wake up to yellow overhead lights left on overnight, and they look particularly warm cast against the winter sun that filters through my windows. No curtains. In my dream, I was sitting in a Starbucks somewhere foreign, waiting on a bench next to two girls whom I did not know. The coffees were taking a while, and so the baristas kept on offering up shared bread. Something to compensate. The loaves of bread were huge and warm. The barista was throwing them overhand over the counter. The bread was soaring through the air and then landing on the floor. The other girls around me were scooping up the loaves and devouring them with their hands. They were breaking the bread in half and then tearing off a morsel for me. That landed on the floor, I was saying. Everyone shrugging. Looks of disgust. I always dream in mundanities. Wearing athleisure and mixing potions this morning, like matrixyl and Argireline and Evian water full of bubbles and microplastics and wind through the open window blowing all the dust around. I watched all the energy come roaring back for each and every false start these past few months, but it’s been a pause in the ebb and flow, now. I like when things are fascinating. Three books from the party are lying on my glass table in the center of my floor. The Champ is Here and Season of the Rat and a book called Alligator, all bought from some place called CASH 4 GOLD. Because the glass table is so big, and the room is so small, the table creates a disproportionate presence. I wonder what will change, once the glass table is gone. Bundled up and then drifted outside to procure a celsius at the bodega and now I am home, again. Listening to Kali Uchis play off my tinny computer speakers from my playlist that reminds me of hot dry desert air and CRYSTALS. Making plans that fifty-percent chance I will then cancel. Trying to finish my Florida, Massachusetts story but the tone requires a kind of gothic and spooky vibe that I am entirely unable to access right now. Everything at Los Angeles Apparel is five dollars, and so I spend the afternoon being gluttonous online. Purchasing a white tube top and a black fine jersey long sleeve and two a-line skirts and some shimmering silver earrings. Purchasing a red circle scarf for Iris, too, because she left her brand new red circle scarf in the basement at my brand new job, and I said I would find it for her but couldn’t. Unsure if I will tell her I have found the scarf, or admit to procuring a new one online. I think I will just hand it over and say nothing. Celia calls, and I tell her about cleaning my windows and live blogging my day. Careful, Celia says. It’s a good idea to talk about things like architecture, or strange observations. It is probably not a good idea to start live blogging your days. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO It’s the most program-less week of the year, and so I’m taking a week off the event call. Watch The Shop Around The Corner and make Sabayon
Inline links: The Shop Around The Corner, Sabayon

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