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The End Of The Year

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The End Of The Year

WHAT I DID Tuesday, December 30 I struggle with specificities of Resolution - there are things I care about in the new year, but these feel more like seasonal ideals, wrought in the empty clarity of colder months and then you hope, adapting gently and seamlessly as time passes. Health, reverence, the discipline to resist the slop of it all until you cease to desire things of excess and rot in the first place. I feel

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WHAT I DID Tuesday, December 30 I struggle with specificities of Resolution - there are things I care about in the new year, but these feel more like seasonal ideals, wrought in the empty clarity of colder months and then you hope, adapting gently and seamlessly as time passes. Health, reverence, the discipline to resist the slop of it all until you cease to desire things of excess and rot in the first place. I return to New York today. I start my New Year today, too. I feel too bogged down by too much to wait. I am trying to feel pure again. I write big letters in my planner - First Week Of The Year. I write in little letters below - I am trying to feel pure again. Back in the city means there’s a party and I’m feeling really sick of talking about these things. I’m feeling like a scene as defined as “social circle” is a wonderful thing to have, but a scene as in “microcosm of politics and culture and the malaise and dreams of our times” is something that I shouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. David is telling me about everyone who’s going to the party and he’s listing off so many names and then he says oh wait it’s actually just three people and he says oh they want us to bring beer and then he says do you want to split an uber with some other friends I didn’t know were in town and then I feel like I’m being absolutely ripped off and so I absolutely refuse to attend. Instead, another Party, I trail David to his friend’s house. Mostly people I don’t know, but I’m feeling pleasant. The boys are playing on a vintage video game console that someone got for free, and I find solitude in the hallway - surprisingly long and isolated for a Chinatown apartment. I pace up and down the hallway like it’s a treadmill and I play on my phone. It’s kind of dark. I would be an eerie sight walking up and down by myself here, but no one can see me. David tells me later that everyone could hear my thumping footsteps going an and and on. I didn’t know this at the time, though. I walk two miles in the hallway. A really weird thing to do, but it’s raining outside and the night feels quietly spooky in a way I want to embrace. Now and then someone on their way to the freezer to replenish the jäger crosses my path, but I avoid collision with ease. I’m listening to music that sounds particularly sweet. I want to bunch it all together. I make a list. Winter Dinner, I call it. It’s a fittingly cheesy name. A playlist title should sound cheap. These are some songs in a playlist. If someone actually played this at a dinner it would probably be a little bit much. Playlists probably shouldn’t even exist. We should probably only listen to albums. The titles of sloppy curation shouldn’t make sense. Winter Dinner - Elliott Smith - Rose Parade - Jacqueline Taieb - Ce soir je m’en vais - Al Stewart - A Small Fruit Song - Tia Blake - Black is the Color - Buffy Sainte-Marie - Until It’s Time For You To Go - 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.” - From 7pm at The Shop — Matt Weinberger is hosting HAPPENINGS with readings by Peter Vack , Beckett Rosset , Izzy Capulong and more. Music by Luke Rathborne and other surprise artists. - From 10pm at Nowadays — Theo Parrish performs all night Saturday, January 4 - From 10pm at Roxy Cinema — WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM screens – “Rachel doesn’t realize she has grown up in captivity working for an advertising agency where her job is to assess Mommy 6.0, her favorite pop star in the whole entire world - From 10pm at Bossa Nova — Celebrate 12 Years of Bossa with Byrell The Great , Physical Therapy , Dime , and more. Sunday, January 5 - From 2:00pm - 4:30pm and 7:30pm - 10:00pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — A new translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House returns, directed by John Gould Rubin . Performances will continue through January 12 . Monday, January 6 - From 7:30pm at The Store (9 Monroe Street) — Matthew Donavan , Neoliberal Hell , and Dan Mancini hosts The January 6th Reading , featuring Peter Vack , Leg5 , Annabel Boardman , Danielle Chelosky , and more. - “The readers are in no way affiliated with the heinous crime perpetrated in 2021. They are just writers. Unless…..” It’s a coup d’état of poets. Tuesday, January 7 - From 7pm at Rodeo (1134 President Street) — The Good Time Girls present MEN: A Reading , featuring Tessa Belle, Daniel Kolitz, Sooyoung Moon, Megan Nolan, Andres Vaamonde, and “the hovering spirit of Ezra Klein and his particular model of masculinity” - From 7pm at Books Are Magic — Adam Ross and EmRata (?) are in conversation on Ross’s new novel Playworld . Per The New York Times - “the hero of this novel is 14. His married girlfriend is 36” - From 7:30pm at St Joseph’s University (245 Clinton Avenue) — The Baffler and Greenlight Books present a reading and discussion to celebrate the release of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Wednesday, January 8 - From 6:30pm (doors) at Baby’s All Right — Kareem Rahma + Tiny Gun , Hyderdaze , Charlie Baker , and more host a fundraiser concert for Zohran Kwame Mamdani - democratic socialist running for mayor. - “Freeze the Rent” “Free Buses” “Rock N’ Roll” Thursday, January 9 - From 7:00- 8:15pm at The Morgan Library — Kafkaesque: Creative Responses to Kafka brings artists influenced by Franz Kafka’s legacy into conversation on the occasion of the currently on view Franz Kafka exhibition. To be honest, I thought this exhibition was really poorly organized and boring, but the accompanying programing seems interesting, and aims to provide further context. - From 7:00 - 8:30pm at SVA Theater — Dean Kissick is discussing the Harper’s article with Anna and Dasha . Tickets for “Wither Contemporary Art” are sold out, but technically linked here .

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