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Pubkey Bar

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Pubkey Bar

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Pubkey Bar is a recurring venue in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 12, 2025 and February 25, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Pubkey Bar is always lit up kind of like an arcade. They sold some sign about crypto for one million dollars here”; “I am sitting at Pubkey Bar drinking a diet coke while I wait for the screening”. It most often appears alongside Ganni, Night Club 101, Washington Square Park.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 12, 2025
  • Last seen: February 25, 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.

Things that Happened Once I Gave Up Vice
November 12, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, November 3 And so everything kind of begins to hover as November sweeps in. The in between weeks. One can leave the city and then one can return. I call Amelia and ask if she’d like to go on another vacation for the aim of seeking things that are transgressive and weird, but the heat and the restlessness and the Miami sun of late-may is long gone, we never did visit the falconry like we planned, everyone would probably prefer to just stay put. Boil bone broth, go to a film, seek employment, write at the gym, braid and unbraid my hair three to four times before I decide to give it a rest. Do you really hate staying put that much?, Amelia asks. I go to the West Village Bitcoin Bar past ten pm in response. Still feverish from the last few days, but the wind outside is nice and the walk along Washington Square Park is quiet, tracing the streets along the park’s West edges past the brownstones and the Washington Square Hotel and the Marlton Hotel and then Pubkey Bar. It is not so much a thing of hating to stay put, but more of feng shui, four small walls, wind and water through my open window and I think most people dislike solitude of a certain kind, which can easily be mistaken for stillness. Pubkey Bar is always lit up kind of like an arcade. They sold some sign about crypto for one million dollars here, once. They sold the president’s autograph. They made me pickletinis and diet coke and seed-oil-free nachos and I used to be kind of manic here, drunk and yelling in the wind and on the street. It is such a desperately quiet night tonight. My friends are seated in the back rooms talking softly about the most valuable parts of a whole whale, their most favorite things about the people close to them, the best sound to elicit tears, the best cherry liqueur, the best ideas for how a person should be. It all comes at me kind of underwater, anyways. It’s all felt kind of shadowy as this year writes over the year before. Tuesday, November 4 And so all the energy came swirling back in an instant. They are playing sweet music like some of the My Fair Lady and the Mad Men soundtrack and J’ai 18 Ans and Zou Bisou Bisou at the hotel lobby with the roaring fireplace and the Cecily Brown mural and the young couples wearing cream slacks and red sweaters and holding newspapers and crinkled baskets of pastries. I have loved winter in New York the most of anything these past few years, and I’d been worried this one would not hold quite the same magic. Walk through the park while it is still early. Wear mostly skirts and tights and thin strapped tops and ballet flats, all black. Order ginger turmeric tea and almond milk cappuccino and write stories by the fire. Disavow hedonism. Disavow becoming the sort of person who does the certain types of things. There’s an order to these things. I tell Amelia; it is good to be mostly quiet. It is good to go to mostly the same places a million times over if the places one chooses are good. Wednesday, November 5 Did you notice everyone became very pleased that you were becoming exactly who you were meant to be when they first put you on Adderall?“ Ellie asked me at the party last night. The night was very warm and the party was very quiet and I was pleased with myself for my relative self possession that evening, which was the goal of the fall and the winter and the days that stretched out kind of breathless. Secret-keepers and Promise-Keepers and finding equilibrium between Self-Possession and Self-Awareness. These were the vaguely worded goals of the winter. No I didn’t really find that, I told Ellie. But I never got the chance to live out my potential on stimulants because I took it too far right away. Ellie nodded with sincere interest. My friends these days were very sincere. And the party was strange because the seating was in bleachers instead of tables and the music was jazz and my friends were very well dressed, decked in corsets and ballet flats and beaded belts and hair with ribbons and holding sparkling drinks with lime and aperol and smiling very broadly. I noticed that time had been passing all along sometime in early November. and so the following fervor came spurred by the sense that something might finally happen. The air got barely perceptively colder and ghosts washed up in dreams or in my courtyard or in signs and symbols like the strange numbers I’d been seeing on the sidewalk. It had been five months to the day since the start of summer and the lurching of my life in unexpected and nefarious though perhaps ultimately necessary ways, which I suppose just goes to show that some sort of momentum was required for time to do anything aside from idly tick on. I remembered that it is just one or two or three promises I make myself and others, though it becomes one million promises if you break one promise a million times. Thursday, November 6 I did nothing in the day yesterday besides watch the clouds make shadows out of various shades of light and dusk across my walls and then I pulled on a small black dress and black Ganni crumbling boots and walked through the quiet night towards Chinatown. The air was too stale and tight inside the sports bar where my friends were all smiles and drinking water and vodka and asking me about fun and faith and so then I walked further downtown to the new wine bar on Henry Street. Here, everyone was very drunk and cast in red light and our table was set in a hallway that resembled a kindergarten classroom and an eclectic group of acquaintances I knew from the Internet or Birthday Parties or Religious Magazines were sharing bottles of wine. To sleep very little means a dream state in the gray morning, which is nice because November Ninth marks the first real distance from the summer for me. The cycles repeated. The cycles grinded to a halt. I woke up to gray morning light through my still open window with a spiral bound notebook and an idea for transcription on the blank page: THINGS THAT HAPPENED ONCE I GAVE UP VICE. Friday, November 7 Listening to Chopin Nocturne op.9 no.2 while the sound of rain mixes with the sound of the turtle pond out the window and I swim in all the visions of where I’ve heard this song before. Like twirling around on brown wood floors during summer storms in the dining room at the house by the ocean while my parents cook fish stews in the kitchen and the floors turn yellow linoleum when you approach the stove and the pouring rain outside streams through the windows and all over the counters. The memory of twirling around and the smell of rain is always the most vivid of all. Like I’m always hurdling towards something or lying very still in all my recollections of things. Obsessed with motion. Arrested by motion! So the main thing now is momentum, I suppose. My Computer keeps on queuing up Chopin the The Nutcracker and Philip Glass Mishima based on past listening habits, but these two scores are both a bit too much to bear right now and so I’m hitting Skip Skip Skip. Not too much has happened since I gave up vice yesterday. Just; Rebecca told me that I look well rested, and the story about El Salvador and network states and techno-spirituality is off to print so I will soon be able to hold it in my hands and then relinquish any narrativization of past events and, it would be nice for energy drinks and nicotine to be coursing through my veins right now but there is something more beautiful and languid in self-induced timeout over microplastics and mind altering substances. Moonless night. Moon hidden behind the rainstorm. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, November 12 From 6:30pm at Night Club 101 — Free reading series Reading 101 launches, ft Swati Sudarsan, Adrienne Raphel, Jessica Lynne, Aurora Huiza, and James Barickman. Music by Solex Yoghurt.
Inline links: Night Club 101, Reading 101
Life-in-a-lab
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Tuesday Life-in-a-lab In my dream, the house was a lab. I woke up to light not just streaming no, but flooding, absolutely pouring through the long glass windows in front of me. I knew that once the light cleared, I would be staring into the heart of this lab. I knew it was a problem that I was anticipating waking up in a lab, because I knew that I should have been anticipating a morning waking up at home. Instead, I was finding myself totally nonplused about waking up in a lab. The important thing, I knew, as I woke up with a sense of increasing urgency, was to conjure up an image of a home, not a lab. You have been in a lab for so long that you have forgotten about home, a very confident voice inside my head was saying. A picture of my childhood bedroom appeared in a few frames. Different versions. Big white bed and blue wooden floors and presently frosty fields behind the house. Little twin bed yellow walls, carpeted floors, and hot summer cornfields outside. I couldn’t get it straight. If I was in a lab, then I needed to remember. You need to remember a place that actually exists, the lab-attendants were saying in my dream. Saying in my head. Glass apartment in the sky. Room at The Marlton Hotel. I’ve been eating vegetables and collecting things like dried flowers and books on Esoteric Health and buying wash-and-fold laundry service and being swept away to places like nice restaurants with no menus and nice-apartments-with-no-owners. I woke up in Connecticut. Can’t wake up in a lab if you never go to sleep. In the morning, I woke up at close to noon. I shared photos on The Internet of a very aesthetically-cohesive and un-lab-like home. I went to the bathroom to wash my face and collect myself as best I could. The house was beautiful, and I was unsure as to why I was watching things unfold from as if I was somewhere else. I made lists of things that were special, being places like this most of all. I made lists of things that compose self respect, and then I made lists of things that compose a life that is bright and white and full of light. The country is quiet and sometimes difficult for me, though I sleep through the night now and this changes everything. Downstairs, the dogs and Celia and the other were sitting under high lofted ceilings. There was a magical and silvery presence that mediation gives to a person. I asked about coffee and they told me there was coffee in the pot and I could heat it up in a silver bowl on the stove. The stove was green and handmade and you turned it on by flicking little metal burner switches. The bowl was nice and very small. I poured the coffee in the bowl and I waited for everything to begin to boil. I added vital proteins collagen and also oat milk creamer and also lots of white sugar because the esoteric health advice of the age says this is fine. There were homemade mini muffins from The Smith Bakery down the street on the counter (blueberry, morning harvest, strawberry corn, and chocolate chip) and so I cut each muffin in half, and then I had one-half-of-each. Two mini muffins total. I put two of the halves in the toaster, and I had two of the halves cold. Everyone started telling me about gnosticism and buddhism and catholicism. They recommended to me a friend who writes about God and married into a famous band. They recommended I come to meditate in places like New York, too. You look ready, Celia said, as I packed up my north face back-pack and changed out of split-sweatpants and banaa-republic-black-top. I’m not, I snapped, in response. Do you actually want to meditate more, Celia asked. I don’t say I want to do things I don’t actually want to do, I replied. I could not stop with all this harshness. Wednesday Grand Central Station Back in New York City and I am totally covered in dog hair. Shoes untied in Grand Central Station but there is nowhere for me to stop and tie them without risking some sort of stampede or at least massive inconvenience and so onward we go. A man just walked towards me rapidly and I flinched and then felt kind of bad. Then, he shouted; young lady can I ask you a question and so now I do not feel bad. My instincts were correct, and now I do not feel bad at all. Ok, fine, whatever. I used to love arriving back in New York and hearing all the music and the lights and I would twirl through this place nonpulsed. Then, I would twirl home. I used to get drunk-before-christmas at the midtown Cipriani and then giggle when people called my ex-boyfriend and I bad-people-for-cutting on the trains toward Albany, but I’m not allowed to move like that anymore. I used to sink into sixty-dollar taxi-cabs because I found the subway over-stimulating. My Prada purse used to be lined with shiny leather, but I got fidgety somewhere tropical and I ripped it all off so now we’re working with something more flattened and matte. Teenage girls used to fling themselves at the side of the train platforms, and conductors used to lose their whole crew in Boston and train heists used to happen. I used to consider everything to be pretty taken-care-of. I think I never used to notice when sometimes, problems would arise. On the train ride back to New York, tonight, the tracks were icy and slick and it was already kind of blue hour dusk. When I said goodbye, I told Celia I love you I love you I love you a million times over because I felt slightly neurotic about a weekend full of being slightly late and slightly harsh. I am smart enough to know that the only thing complaining makes you better at is complaining, so I decided to stop. In Grand Central Station, they are playing live music, and I watch a man propose, though no one else around the soon-to-be newlyweds reacted. No photos or energy. Sad. I am wearing beat up Ganni knee high boots and Brandy Melville long sleeved dress, and Zara blazer that I stole from Paul’s Baby Grande back when I was in the practice of going lots of places and stealing lots of things. I miss my Max Mara coat that I left at “tech week” and I miss “drinking” and I am suddenly desperate to be out the door. I imagine that when the subway doors fly open and I burst out free and all-in-one piece, I will see the Washington Square Park arch, and it will be glowing silver in mid-winter light. I imagine that the city will feel warm with soon-to-be-spring-humidity. I imagine that since groundhog day has come and gone the tides will change soon, and I imagine I will relinquish my Groundhog Day (1993) fantasies of nothing-ever-happens at some point down the line, when it all becomes a bit too much to take. Tomorrow, I will be taking my shoes to the tailor and then the next day, I will have a totally fresh new crop of things to wear. I imagine that soon, I will have a fresh new crop of things to consider. Thursday Whore Dialectics Greenwich Village’s bitcoin bar sports a libertarian clientele and taxidermy and a podcast studio and beef-tallow-fries. Tonight, it sports a projector screen from my old apartment that looks sad and small propped on stage, and a big audience in metal chairs, and a birthday party in the front room, and plenty of opportunities to make myself feel useful as I tinker with film equipment and fire off texts regarding “promotional material.” I am sitting at Pubkey Bar drinking a diet coke while I wait for the screening of “Whore Dialects” to begin. When I ordered my diet coke at the bar, a strange man made a strange joke about NA beer, and I felt immediately irritated and restrained by my self imposed limits. I am listening to a group of young men discuss the career path of “Internet Pervert” as one of the only viable post-AI jobs. Monetize your self destruction, they are saying. Male prostitution. Buying plushies is to women as buying porn is to men. There’s a strange pseudo-intellectual glare to it all and I am enjoying listening in. They are talking about Brian Kaplan, but they keep on mispronouncing his name. They are talking about scientists, rationalists, and flexible proposals. When they talk about Internet Perverts, there are stars in their eyes, less because of the sex, it seems, and more because the internet perverts are able to get some money and get some attention. The male influencer. That seems to be what they are starry eyed about. They are thrilled to be in the same extended universe as someone who might be able to garner some vague attention. This is a bar that usually makes me feel kind of hazy. This is a bar where I used to make scenes. Enough reminiscing, because I am here to watch a film that is all about auto-documentarians, which is in sharp contrast to the maladjusted forms of auto-diary or auto-fiction. In the film, a beautiful girl is in the back of a car with the wind in her face and she is drinking an Erewhon smoothie and talking about how Hollywood is dead and the monasteries are empty and you can’t be a nun or get a phd because you question what truth is, and these institutions just won’t let you get at it. After that, the film cuts to a scene where the girl is in a white dress being play-drowned in the ocean by a right-wing provocateur. The film crew sent the provocateur to stay with the girl, and it was kind of the perfect setup, a voiceover explains. The provocateur describes how when he arrived, the girl was in a state of almost total abjection. Like how kids who are sexually assaulted don’t shower to make themselves totally disgusting and unappealing, he explains. I find the provocateur slightly less interesting as a character than both the girl, and the disgraced art-advisor (another prominent character in the film) but I like when he argues about politics and then reconciles on a personal level with those around him in places like California. I like the scenes about the professionally fraught yet personally friendly relationship between the art advisor and his not terribly successful clients, ie the clients are disappointed but still use the advisor’s pool for summer swims. The client still dreams of having an eighteen person studio because this means tremendous success, and because this is just how men dream. When the provocateur is described but not depicted as losing control, it is explained that the jig is kind of up, because it’s no triumph of power to reign over somebody who is not even in control of themselves. I only watch the film once and I am not taking notes, really, during the public screening at the Bitcoin Bar, but I like it because it is auto-documentary not auto-fiction or auto-diary and as such, it is very precise. The film says, for someone like me in the conditions like the ones I occupy, here is what life is like. This is more matter of fact and less indulgent than saying; here is what life is like for me. At a party last month that was also all about art whores, the filmmakers wrote a few lines about a few of my friends. The women present were on average quite a bit younger than the men and looked fresh. Perhaps because of their age, or perhaps because of the care they put into their bodies and minds, but the vibe among the women was optimistic and exuberant. I thought this was nice. Nice, too, to catch purity in unexpected places while staying totally true. Friday Upper West Side Later, I am uptown and I am thinking about how I can become more self-disciplined so I can become more interesting. I am watching Pierre Le Fou at Lillian’s apartment on the Upper West Side and all the girls are dressed like characters in the film. Lilian keeps leaning out the window with a long skinny cigarette and I am drinking a glass of Sancerre because I just can’t quit. In this film, a very small man is holding a gun to a very beautiful girl’s head while she cuts her hair. The beautiful girl has a brunette bob, and she is wearing a red dress. The film is full of primary colors and very bright paint. When a man is stabbed, he bleeds red paint. Before a man explodes himself in dynamite at the end of the film, he paints himself blue. I like the film because the colors of the gore are all bright and fake like paint, and the colors of the scenery are all pastel and muted and lovely like real life. Summer in The Riviera. Beautiful people living a simple and crime-filled life. I have not watched very many films this year because I’ve been busy writing thirty-thousand-words-about-myself-per-week. In the last film I watched, a Japanese cat was exploded by a grenade, and when gore and guts spilled everywhere, I flinched and clenched my eyes shut. Do you want to leave, my friend asked, and what I wanted was to be resilient, but what I said was I don’t really care. Now, a girl in the film is sitting on a boat with a man, and she is talking about how the two have only known each other for a few million seconds. She’s such a stupid girl, Lillian says. I would say something like that, I respond. One-million-billion-seconds and one-million-billion-words. I am feeling bubbly when I am not feeling sick or shy. I am feeling like it’s time to be more light about it. When I look to my left, I see beautiful stained glass lamps and a defense surveillance tech-branded throw blanket. When I look to my right, I see an open window and all my friends leaning too far outside smoking skinny vogues. On the Internet, people are talking about how things are only interesting if they are true. Determinative reasoning then says, one should make what is true more interesting. Everything just became crystal clear. By which I mean, everything is operating on material terms now. DIRECTORY The full event calendar is now going to live on The Aleph - an exciting new platform by Noah Kumin of The Mars Review of Books. The Aleph is a marketplace and membership club for the arts, with an emphasis on supporting in-person events, production, and funding for artists. Programming featured will be intentional and curated, and include more opportunities for early-access and invitation-only events. If you would like to submit an event for consideration, please email me at chloegpingeon@gmail.com. Apply to join The Aleph here I will still be featuring select events on the blog, along with more eclectic or personal recommendations, news, and guest features. To start: David Rimanelli is perhaps my favorite person to follow on Instagram, as well as one of my favorite critics. Tonight, from 6:30pm at Tibet House, he will be reading, along with Kiely Sweatt and Sean Fabi. Tickets here.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1h49!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd95f9aef-d112-4dd9-a0fb-1610ba693067_1536x2048.jpeg, The Aleph, chloegpingeon@gmail.com, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!m6hb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5452bedc-f504-4cc0-a6f3-349820bdb9a3_1156x1138.png, David Rimanelli, here

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