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City Built on Crystals

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City Built on Crystals

NOTE: this letter is too long for email - view event calendar on browser or substack 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.

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NOTE: this letter is too long for email - view event calendar on browser or substack 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 wha t, 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 - From 9pm in the Lower East Side (dm @ Jackiearielle for location) — Painters Pool returns with hosts Olivia Toups and Nick Hobbs . A weekly party for painters and friends, Tuesday in New York (and now in Paris too). Gather your painter friends - that’s your ticket in. - From 9:15pm at Metrograph — My Movie Chat is seeing The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999). - From 10pm - 4am at Le Bain — On Top with DJ’s Vibeiana, Orson, Griffin Maxwell Brooks The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) - image via Metrograph | On Top at Le Bain Wednesday, September 10 - From 7pm at KGB Red Room — Straight Girls returns with readings from Claire DeVoogd, Crystal Wood, Jen Fisher, Laith Ayogu, and Willow Wilderness Hour. - From 6pm - 8pm — Whole slew of downtown openings. Megan Marin at Francis Irv (106 Walker St); Allen-Golder Carpenter at Derosia (197 Grande St); Lucas Odahara at David Peter Francis (35 E Broadway); and Jean-Luc Mouléne at Miguel Abreu (88 Eldridge). - From 7:30pm - 9:00pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — It’s your last week to see ARDOR - a very special play following a group of nine artists and friends on an annual retreat to their aging patrons Vermont farmhouse. Nothing and everything has changed and will change. | Additional showtimes - Sep 11 , Sep 12 , Sep 13 , Sep 14 . - From 7pm - 11pm at TV Eye — AltCitizen 15 Year Anniversary Show series continues with The Next One . Hosted by Violet Trotter. Live performances by TVOD, direct support by local band under a fake name, and Hearsay from LA debuting in NYC Allen-Golder Carpenter at Derosia, Megan Marin at Francis Irv, Jean-Luc Moulene at Miguel Abreau, Lucas Odahara at David Peter Francis. Ardor by Matthew Gasda - Image via BCTR Thursday, September 11 - From 6:30pm - 8pm at Mast Books — Archway Editions presents the release of Olivia Kan-Sperling ’s LITTLE PINK BOOK . - “Taking the form of a conversation with Jamieson Webster on the subject of Hysteric Literature, this will be both a literary summit and celebration of a significant new novel and experiment in form” - From 6pm at Rizzoli (1133 Broadway) — Jordan Castro is in conversation with Brandon Taylor to celebrate the release of his new novel, Muscle Man (out today, September 9) | RSVP free - From 6:30pm at Night Club 101 — Doxy Mag x Mutt Readings presents an evening with readers Celina Reboyras, Disney, Camille Sojit Pejcha, Magdalene Taylor, Mani Melaka, and Liara Roux. - From 6:30pm - 9pm at Night Club 101 — AltCitizen 15 Year Anniversary Show series returns with The Return . Swear Tapes, Certain Death, and Croaker. Hosted by Matthew Donovan - From 9pm - 2am at Baby’s All Right — Label presents The Afters . Sets by Harmony Tividad and more. Hosted by Whitney Mallet, Carolina de Armas, Misc-En-Scene, Mia Manning, Ni Ouyang, Elizabeth Clayton, Rachel Weiswasser, and Kathryn Kearny. | Tickets : $15 - From 10pm - late at Nublu — RATS returns with Bogie Nights Band, Zack Bia, and a special guest. | tickets $22 - From 10pm - 4am at Soho Grand Hotel — Los Angeles Apparel throws a NYFW party celebrating the launch of the Soho Flagship Store . | RSVP required - rsvpnyfw@losangelesapparel.net - From 11pm - 4am at Market Hotel — Suzy Sheer is live with Anna Luna, Garett Caramel, and Velvette Blue. Co-hosted by Aakash Kakkar and Lola Dement Myers. | tickets : $22

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