Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

Clandestino

21 min read

Clandestino

Article

Clandestino is a recurring venue in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between October 21, 2024 and May 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I go to Clandestino. I go home”; “Later, outside Clandestino, some guy in the New York Young Republicans”; “Rebecca asks me about my Resolutions at Clandestino”. It most often appears alongside EARTH, David, KGB.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: October 21, 2024
  • Last seen: May 01, 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.

Everything I Wanted
October 21, 2024 · Original source
I say something incoherent about Massachusetts. She suggests we all exchange emails. I’m not particularly enthused, but I wish the middle aged couple well. I wish their fake older-zoomer daughter well. I go to Clandestino. I go home. It was a birthday dinner tonight. It was nice
Inline links: Clandestino
Playing With Glass
November 05, 2024 · Original source
Later, I go to a reading at KGB. The reading is too crowded and I can’t squeeze into the room, and so I order drinks on the main floor instead. It’s crowded here, too. Everyone is talking about the election. I’m a little drunk and so I say that I’m a little sad because I miss things like my parents' 2008 Obama Election Watch Party. Everyone looks confused. I don’t try to explain the purity of the thrill in the air that I feel strangely defensive of. I don’t want everyone to make fun of me for remembering bureaucracy as thrilling and pure. Upstairs, they are telling horror stories. Later, outside Clandestino, some guy in the New York Young Republicans is talking about how he voted four times today, and how tomorrow he’s on his way to Pennsylvania, to vote four more times. I’m pretty sure he’s lying, which makes the whole thing all relatively harmless, and in the-way-of-vibes, makes it kind of more depressing.
The End Of The Year
January 03, 2025 · Original source
Joan Baez - It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue Later, someone puts on After Hours (1985), and so I cease my pacing in place and I go rejoin the group. "Maybe this is just a movie about guys who are lost in like... New York and girls who are scary and incomprehensible," someone is saying. "I hate to make everything political, I'm self conscious about making everything political, but there are no movies except for this about men and the weird, weird, weird ass shit women put them through," says someone else. Later, I go back to the hallway and I practice leaping and twirling. David tells me my twirls would be very impressive if I was like… eleven years old. Later, we go to The Scratcher. It’s a bar in the East Village. "They have onion and cheese sandwiches," David says. He says this three or four times. I ask the bartender about the sandwiches when we get there. It's a suspiciously small bar. No kitchen in sight. I broach the topic gently. "My boyfriend is wondering if you... have a kitchen?" I ask. The bartender shakes his head. "Onion and cheese sandwiches?" I say. The bartender shakes his head. So don't come here for the food, is the lesson, but it's a nice vibe. I get a terrible moscow mule. I get two vodka sodas. I liked the night better before the drinks. Intentional haziness intuitively goes against everything I have recently been craving. Tonight, the first half of the evening is best. Wednesday, December 31 Rebecca asks me about my Resolutions at Clandestino. Give me three, she says. Avoid being cruel and prioritize mental and physical clarity, I say. My sister rolls her eyes, because these sentiments are kind of just My Talking Points lately. One more, says Rebbeca. Be really healthy, I say. This seems to satisfy everyone. Morning - I walk for an hour and I write on the treadmill. I do this every day. It's the only element of "routine" that I can honestly claim as consistently mine. The main thing to consider is this: I have a life now, that I fundamentally thought I was too half formed and unstable to access maybe ever, least of all soon. I cherish this more than anything. There is so much beauty now. It happened suddenly. A fundamental conflict comes in an occasional residual desire to destroy it all in ways that are very cruel. This is the fundamental conflict, I suppose. The main thing to fix. If you remember how much you cherish all you have, then the desire to destroy it fades. Things like this are often very simple. I'm walking at a quick pace and I'm writing about how much there is that I cherish. I'll be less confessional this year. New Moon yesterday. This is the last of it. The last of purging my sins in broad vague strokes, I mean. Afternoon - purging my apartment. The roof is leaking and they're saying it needs to be replaced. I love this apartment. It's far too small for two people, but I hope we can stay. I'm getting rid of all the excess in the meantime. I want to wake up to empty floors and sparkling windows. Evening - a beautiful dinner party. New Years downtown, after. Six am. Everything feels very fresh. There's always more to say, but I shouldn't. Nihilism doesn't cure paranoia, but absurdism does. I want to walk outside for hours and write by hand in little notebooks. It's time to stop musing. Days of self indulgence. Sick of it. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Happy New Year. Things are still picking back up in New York… Friday, January 3 From 6pm - 9pm at Harkwaik — Exene Karros solo show Spirit opens. These paintings look really beautiful, and the exhibition seems interesting – “the ubiquity and ambivalence of corporate iconography, the banality of violence and pleasure, the vacancy of identity articulated through narrow registers, and the thrill of transgressive appropriation linger.”
Inline links: Harkwaik, Exene Karros
Burn my diaries
January 23, 2025 · Original source
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.
Big long list of activities
May 01, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Saturday, April 26 I have decided to become myself again. The notes of the past week aren’t quite so indicative of this undertaking. I don’t want you to read them. I’m sorry. I tried to spin something out of nothing, but there are too many pieces all ravelled up amongst themselves, and the most interesting story of the week is not even one that is mine to tell. Big long list of activities - Domino Reading Series at The Old Pyramid club and Gideon Jacob’s play at Earth and Le Dive for dinner and Clandestino for drinks and going to class and then calling some hotels and then I did go out again; KGB for Meg Spectre’s comedy show then to Seward Park and Clockwork and Ten Bells and the parked van where they were throwing the party. Dinner on Friday and breakfast on Saturday; a house party and The Commerce Inn and the screening at The Roxy of The Code and then sushi with David and Ruby and Liam. I came home after that. And this is one way to describe a life. Short and sweet and holding my knees tight to my chest and I do not want to tell about the things that happened in between. Usually, my issue is I want to tell far too much of it all. I’m like… fanning the fucking air around me feeling pretty desperate to create some motion, distance, think about time and space like the cracked tunnels in the blue goop of an ant farm or like in sand and then I flood it all with water. Whoosh. Nothing ever happens. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, May 1 From 5pm at CANADA — Casual Encountersz presents May Day Reading Series; featuring Delia Cai, Aria Aber, George Porcari, Chriss Small, Jacob Ace, and other guests. Curated by Tif Sigfrids and Sadie Alaska. The night is very loosely themed around laber.
Inline links: CANADA, Casual Encountersz

Graph View

Backlinks