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Void of Course

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Void of Course

WHAT I DID Monday, October 6 They are swimming in the water because they hope to never die , the Russian writer is told, in Nostalghia (1983). The Italian villagers are bathing in steaming blue mineral pools and discussing the man who locked his family up for seven years on account of fear of the outside world. It is my favorite Tarkovsky, and Dory suggests we go to Metrograph for the late night viewing tonight.

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WHAT I DID Monday, October 6 They are swimming in the water because they hope to never die , the Russian writer is told, in Nostalghia (1983). The Italian villagers are bathing in steaming blue mineral pools and discussing the man who locked his family up for seven years on account of fear of the outside world. It is my favorite Tarkovsky, and Dory suggests we go to Metrograph for the late night viewing tonight. She wants to see the candle scene again. She wants to parse out whether the composer in the film is a product of delusion or reality. She wants to be reminded of dreams and mist and Saint Catherine of Siena, and I want to see foggy long shots and the part where a beautiful little girl in a rock cave tells the drunk man, yes, I am very happy to be alive . It’s a kind of ghostly journey to the theater. Monday night, and so there are not too many people out, though I can tell when a girl is heading to the same place as me because she will be wearing something like a tattered tank top and skirt and lots of gold rings and a few bangles. I spot a few such girls somewhere around Delancey Street, and by the time I reach Ludlow Street, there is a group of us walking in silent quickstep. The theater is surprisingly full. The mood is surprisingly heavy and quiet. By midnight, when the snow falls over the Russian writer and the German Shepard and the Italian countryside and the hologram of the colosseum and the candles have all been placed in quivering gestures of immolation, reverence, or madness, and the lights come on in the theater, I am certain that autumn is here. The last time I saw this film, I stepped outside into bright summer heat, Dory tells me. This is certainly not a summer film , I tell Dory. I step over puddles on the walk home. I mute my own nostalgia. I think about how this isn’t something dull like another movie about aging, but there is something reticent about madness that comes from envisioning eternity. Mystics and schizophrenics. It’s just one life all at once. I stayed up all night last night until the sky turned hazy blue and cotton candy pink, and my Nosferatu metal bedframe turned all washed in pastel color and then, I remembered time had been passing all along. Poured Blueland soup and dragged a dishrag across the hard wood floors. Stood in cream white socks by a small metal stove and fried bacon and eggs in avocado oil. Fried a non-iron-fortified flour tortilla in coconut oil and threw tomato on top. Thought about the sort of person who starts a day in this way. Thought about how a morning like this could almost be something else. Almost like I went to sleep and woke up to this. Cotton candy skies and bacon, eggs, the good sort of oils. Starting a day instead of blurring one into the next. Blurring everything together. Watching fog and music and stone castle villages and Madonnas and Patron Saints all blur together in the most harrowing film in the world at Metrograph. I like Nostalghia , but it is such a harrowing film. BEAUTIFUL AND HARROWING FILM , I text Celia. To My Mother , Tarkovsky dedicated the film. If it wasn’t past midnight, I would call my own family and say sorry. I’ve been thinking about myself a lot. I would mostly say I’m sorry for that. Tuesday, October 7 Here is an idea: clear out your room of everything nice, leave only the decrepit and ugly things behind, lie in filth for a month or a few, and then clear things out even further. Clear out your room of anything aside from blank space and empty floor, and one fitted sheet, and lie there for a little longer. It will be winter or perhaps even spring, now. Bring back your beautiful things. Fill your room with everything nice. Determine how a person should be. Alain de Botton talks about this. He talks about how you can pick a whole new life through exercises in Architectures of Unhappiness like this one. I am springing out of bed this morning with a strong and pervasive desire for a whole new life. It got cold for a minute, and this shift in seasons scrubbed everything clean. I am yet to scrub my room of everything beautiful, everything empty, or everything bad. Today I will build a beautiful life. Today I will buy a beautiful life. This again but this time I mean it: TO DO - Finish and edit blog - Reach out to my Guests - Follow up with publication waiting on El Salvador piece - Edit Do You Wish To Live Forever - Write description about Courgette Soup - Continue publicity for play - Apply for gallery job - Read for one hour a day and write fiction for one hour a day - Be totally sober-for-now - Exercise intensely for an hour a day - Consider today the first day of the rest of my life - Unbox Ralph Lauren skirts and decide what to sell and what to keep - Clean my room - Remember that it is just one life all at once - Remember that it is just one person all at once - Right my wrongs mostly through not repeating them and forgive those who have wronged me mostly through prayer Wednesday, October 8 In the mood for beautiful items and caution to the wind, I spent last night with memories, collages, beautiful images of beautiful things. Spent last night making drawings on the floor and watching home videos and pawning through little gold crosses for sale on vintage resale scammer sites. Little gold chains with amethysts. Blue pearls. White pearl chains. Tiny little silver hands clutched together. I wanted everything. Wanted a ceramic box stuffed chock full of precious stones. I reconsidered what I wanted. I wanted to unearth new memories. I wanted to recall everything I worried I’d forgotten. On a flash drive, I wanted to find a video from a winter. One can tell it is winter because everyone in the frame is wearing big coats and has that sort of frosty happy manic sun set early look in their eyes. I wanted to throw a dinner party. I wanted to print out every video I’d ever taken from every dinner party I’d ever thrown and keep them on polaroid papers in my bedside table. Wanted the videos to play on printed paper like a film when I touched them. Wanted to open my bedside table and take out pieces of paper that came to animation-style-life with simulacras of candles and autumn and freezing early evening air and the part where the doors close and the guests are gone and one says, that was a good dinner party . I have been to the movies, a concert, ballroom dancing, writing class. Everything is changing because of something in the Blood Moon and wind and ambitions came roaring back to life along with urgency pertaining to health and rejuvenation and someone else’s problems usurped my own. I walk to Grace’s concert in the evening. How did the blood moon treat you ? Sam asks me inside the venue. Dark and small. Grace’s face was swimming all around the televisions on the wall and her voice was sweet like an angel and my new friends were reassuring me that if they saw someone scribbling symbols on post-it notes in writing class they would be intrigued and not disturbed. The Blood Moon was up and down , I tell Sam. Makes sense , Sam tells me. On account of my Pisces Moon. On account of things I don’t believe in. On account of a psychic who said something like this might happen and for now I could expect a little while longer, at least, of sparkling water in the East Village and holding court by the East River and a tip-toeing holding-steady kind of limbo-life that lasts for a few months and maybe years, though not forever. There is a train to the ocean again, tomorrow. That should shake things up. Thursday, October 9 I missed the train to the ocean by one instant, and so the yellow cab glides right past Moynihan Train Hall and then back towards Soho and a murky turtle pond, unpacked bags, more of the same. Do you feel grief because it is the first day of Fall , Amelia asks me. Is it something in the air? Was it something in the Blood Moon? Things have become all crisp and wane, you see. I feel grief because I missed my train , I tell Amelia. I am craving a sense of everything empty and clean and gray autumn ocean and a world where nothing ever changes and nothing ever stagnates all the same. This is the only sort of thing I have strong opinions about. My whims and also, what is beautiful and what is not. I was sitting by the fire at The Marlton, earlier, and the girls across the table were trying to conjure up strong opinions. Mostly trying to find moral fault lines in the structure of things that they might crack open and uno-reverse for the sake of mostly their own personal gain. It was so depressing to listen to. I stopped listening. Friday, October 10 On the first day of Perfect Autumn, Iris and I go to The Commerce Inn for dinner. We are still quite young and are going to live quite a long time , Iris says. A random stranger at The Marlton Hotel told me and Amelia not to be so hard on ourselves and I thought he was chastising our lifestyles choices and not just being invasive yet kind and so I nodded violently and said ‘I know, I know, I know ,” I tell Iris. The Commerce Inn is the sort of place one can only go in evening, and in fall or mainly winter though it is known for ‘Brunch.’ Tonight feels like a very Autumnal affair. Dark and surrounded by fallen leaves. The moon is Void Of Course , the stranger at The Marlton told me. Iris and I order oysters and bone marrow and fluke. The last time I was here, I ordered potted shrimp and it was snowing and I tucked carry-on baggage under the table, filled up on wine and aioli, caught an overnight flight to Los Angeles straight through the storm. At tea today, Celia told me; I don’t care about anything if I’m not nostalgic . That’s because you value intensity above all other things and cannot comprehend any other structure to a way a life should be , I told Celia. It’s the right structure for a life to be , Celia told me. I agree , I told Celia. The threads of things have been a bit disjoined. I am beginning Ninety Day Novel , I tell Iris. It wasn’t for me , Iris tells me. What was for you ? I ask Iris. Becoming possessed , Iris tells me. She tells me some other things, too. She doesn’t tell me what to do. I kind of lost my nostalgic fervor , I tell Iris. I know you love the winter , Iris tells me. So, it is just one life all at once, which I’ve been telling myself since June and I am finally starting to believe. Iris and I start to walk to The Hudson. We reroute towards Greenwich Village and it is finally getting freezing. I am finally getting sick of talking about these sorts of things. I will talk about something else, soon. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, October 13 - From 4pm at Roxy Cinema — The Downtown Festival continues today and all week. At 6:15pm ; world premiere of The Isdal Man by Gus Dapperton, with a Q&A moderated by Lucas Hedges. A film about Scandinavia and a vlogger (?) - I hope to make it to this. From 8:15pm; Love New York (Anthony Di Mieri). From 10:45pm; City Wide Fever . - From 7pm (readings 8pm) at TJ Byrnes — Patio returns with an evening of reading, ft John Wolfe, Alec Niedenthal, Angie Sijun Lou, Asheligh Bryant Phillips, Joseph Grantham, and Anika Jade Levy. - “Come for the fun, stay for the shepherd’s pie.” Tuesday, October 14 - From 7pm at Dear Friends Books — A reading in dialogue with Aheem by Rafael Martinez - presenting a selection of 34 images made over the course of a year. Readings by Brian Alarcon, Adriant Khadafhi Bereal, Sam Falb, Claire Gustavson, Merilyn, Lindsay Perryman, and Julio Tavarez. - From 7pm - 9pm at 365 Apartment (above Happier Grocer) — Late To The Party Press presents a reading ft Brandon Stosuy, Greta Rainbow, Derek Neal, Lillian Sullam, and Imogene Mahalia. Wednesday, October 15 - From 7pm at Honey’s — Joyland Publishing presents the launch of All Girls Be Mine Alone by Sophie Strohmeier . Readings from the novella by Finn Marie, Aliza Simons, and Morgan Zipf-Meister. DJ set to follow. | tickets here - From 7pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Eurozone Reading Series hosts their first event - contemporary plays from Europe, curated by Seth Bockley. Featuring Paul Felten, Erin Leland, George Olesky, Erica Dasher, and Ellen Morgan Butler | Tickets here . - From 7pm, 8pm, and 9pm at Night Club 101 — Susannah Yugler premieres the first iteration of Third Generation - they will perform on a loop with timed entry every hour. | Tickets $20 presale, $30 day off. - LONDON - From 8pm at The Mandrake Hotel — Soho Reading Series and Minor Attractions present The Geoff Dyer Gala. Readings from Geoff Dyer, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Rosa Lyster, and Jago Rackham. Hosted by Tom Willis. | RSVP here . Thursday, October 16 - From 6pm - 8pm at Mast Books — Stephanie LaCava celebrates the launch of her new novel Nymph (Verso Books). - From 6pm - 8pm at Blade Study — Andrew Woolbright solo exhibition ‘ Baldanders ’ opens - “the second in an ongoing series of performances in which the artist, educator, and writer considers the format of interview as a form of sculpture. The exhibitions’ title references a German mythical figure, Baldanders, who changes its physical form the longer a conversation continues.” - From 7pm - 9pm at Baby’s All Right — D8 Time is getting spooky with an evening of tricks, treats, and true love. | Tickets here - From 7pm - 10pm at 37 Greenpoint Ave #316 — N+1 celebrates ISSUE #51: FORCE MAJEURE with readings and drinks. Ft Elias Rodriques, Lily Scherlis, Maria Marchinkoski, Dayna Tortoric, Lisa Borst, and Colin Vanderburg. RSVP here Friday, October 17 - From 9pm - 12am at The Bench — GirlPox presents The Opening Night Party , in celebration of their debut production FYRE FEST WAS SO FUN!!! A night of magic, music, hair featuring, karaoke, and more. - From 4:15pm — Much more from The Downtown Festival . Saturday, October 18 - From 7:30pm and 9:30pm at The Bench — Two more chances to see FYRE FEST WAS SO FUN!!! - From 9pm - 2:30am — Stop1 returns to Hellphone with Mesa, Kettle, and Sotiris. Free ! Sunday, October 19 - From 12:30pm at 7 Lispenard St — Sophia Englesberg, Clara Nevins, and Charlie Rinehart-Jones present Fight Club III - a reading series for new screenplays. Sunday’s reading is WILDERNESS by Seth Bockley. | tickets here . - From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Danielle Chelosky celebrates the launch of Female Loneliness Epidemic (Far West Press). - From 7:30pm at The Bench — Your last chance to see FYRE FEST WAS SO FUN!!! - From 8:40pm - 10:30pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Matthew Gasda presents a reading of Last Days of Downtown . The third play in the Dimes Square and Afters trifecta.

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