Collected Agenda with Julia Harrison

Guest Edit #17

Drawing on the diary as a medium of both confessional interiority, and visceral engagement with the physical world - guest edits ask creative people to share What They Did and What You Should Do.

Introducing Julia Harrison (Instagram) (Saloon) (orzo bimbo)

INTRODUCTION

Julia Harrison is a commerce writer at Architectural Digest, living in Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder of saloon, a curated creative community & networking hub. She maintains a newsletter that she considers too personal, and that I consider just right called orzo bimbo.

First, I found Saloon. Next, I read The Center for Short the center for Short-Lived Phenomena. It is extremely difficult to merge seamlessly, the worlds of art, design, brand events, PR, the Jenni Kayne store in Tribeca, a restaurant called “beefbar” with raw emotion, and vulnerability that never risks navel-gazing. Orzo Bimbo leaves me breathless. “She’s so tasteful it makes you ill,” Julia says. But Julia is the most tasteful of them all, quietly, thoughtfully. She is of these worlds that are often glossy, and she writes on them, on art and life and self, with a center that holds. “I could sometimes feel between worlds—one of which was real life,” Julia writes. She writes about the other worlds, the scene-y ones, the beautiful impermeable ones, the girlhood-esque ones and the influencer-forward content-heavy ones. I do not feel between worlds in reading Julia’s writing. She is a guide I trust with absolution, and this Real Life does remain the throughline. Julia writes what's a life supposed to look like?, the PR is deluding you, everything and nothing always haunts me. In many ways, Julia’s style is what I imagine an actualized version of this diary would look like and become. I skirt around specifics because I fear they cheapen me. The specifics make the heart of it in Julia’s work, and she deals in contradiction, beauty, brands, museums, hangovers, immortalization with a grace and soul that I admire so deeply.

Saloon is “a symbiotic space to take your idea from its genesis to its execution.” Saloon is a club that exists both irl and online through a newsletter and by-admission-only group chat, putting editors, writers, brands, PR, creators, brand marketers, event managers, restaurant/bar owners, & so many more in one space. Members include Bon Appetit, GQ, NY Mag, Worms Mag, Penguin Press, FSG, Reformation, Rothy’s, Ralph Lauren, Glossier, Noon, Cultural Counsel, Cassis, Sweetgreen, Dear Friends Books, Squarespace, Malala Fund, and many more. As you can see, Saloon has range. An example of the newsletter here.

Previously, Julia was a writer and editor for Coveteur, passerby, and The Sewanee Review.

Julia loves a project.

WHAT JULIA HARRISON DID

Monday: I wake up late and inspect my wounds from falling off a bike at 3:30am on Saturday, coming back from a bar in Williamsburg. I spent the night flirting with 26-year-olds and drinking Miller High Life.

At work, I see Anna Wintour without her sunglasses on for the first time—“like seeing a teacher outside of school,” my co-worker says. I go to Eataly for lunch and linger at the canned olives. I go to three different grocery stores on the way home from work, one being Trader Joe’s where a man follows me around the store, telling me about the significance of tulips in the Netherlands. At home, I cook salmon and pack my lunches for the week. I listen through an MF DOOM album twice and remind myself to look up if they ever released how he died. I eat that in my bed because my roommate is on the couch, knitting to the low sound of one of her podcasts. She and I don’t talk anymore. I watch Narcos. I look for non-toxic whitening strips on Amazon while I FaceTime Molly and we go through all the Instagram DMs I got about how I looked like I was in a wheelchair in my most recent story for AD on office chairs. “Something about the posture,” she says. She prints the photo and puts it on her fridge.

Tuesday: I eat lunch in Brookfield Place with my coworkers. We talk about work, and Kate’s crush from club soccer. I write about ottomans, new arrivals, decor under 300, the re-opening of the Frick Collection. Glen Powell is at Condé’s café promoting his ketchup. From work, I take a comped Uber to Brooklinen’s PR dinner in Williamsburg. I’m an hour early so I sit at the closest bar to the venue, which is, of course, huge, empty, playing “Everlong.” Outside, long-bearded men smoke cigarettes. The bartender has a bar handle mustache, the hostess must be barely 21, the rest of the staff is lip-ringed and taking a shot altogether. It’s 6:04pm. There’s one woman who is loud and one-of-the-boysing while they shoot back Jagermeister. You can tell she has worked here the longest. The hostess pours me a Pinot Noir to the brim. It’s gross, which is perfect, the way thin coffee from a Dixie cup is perfect.

The dinner looks as you’d expect: fluted glass vases, checkered lilies, nametags with dried, pressed flowers. I sit next to a PR Manager, who has big eyes, short hair, perfect skin. She’s from Granite Bay, California. I think I’ve been there. I shake her down for her entire life story over one “Brooklinen and lime twist.” We talk about men, how 9-month relationships can cut you deeper than 3-year ones, because it doesn’t matter the duration, it only matters the intensity. Intense things last about 6 months, in my experience. Everything lasts about 6 months for me. She tells me about getting cancer at 23.

The focaccia has the texture of pound cake. Our other seatmate talks about the John Deere event he just came from, a collab with some fashion brand we haven’t heard of featuring zippered “butt access pants—not even assless chaps,” he says, and a hoodie with a hole for your ponytail, and “jeans that can hold your phone so it doesn’t slip out on the tractor.” Can’t all jeans hold your phone? We think, but none of us has ever been on a tractor.

Wednesday: All day we text about his Survivor audition. I said it in passing on our date, 6 hours of drinking and we slept together. For two weeks he texts me music and little quips, but doesn’t ask me out again. Finally: want to film my Survivor audition next week? I think it’s a come-on, a cute way to initiate a second date. It quickly becomes clear it’s not—actually, he needs someone to hold the camera. He has a Google Doc from two years ago he shares with me called “Survivor audition”—“strictly 3-mins max that shows me and my personality. Survivor likes go-getters. Show how you’re living your best life, the life you want.” It’s 5 pages long. There’s a “stories I can tell” section that includes “Vietnam street soup story,” and “Beatles tripping story.”

I leave work early and clean my house. I haven’t been home properly in a week, so I have recycling in the hallway, a punctured air mattress in the foyer, dishes in the sink, a mountain of clothes on my bed, a rancid hamper. I shower. 90 minutes before our date, he cancels. A “sore throat.” There’s a few reasons a man has a sore throat, and none of them have to do with having a sore throat. I said no to a number of things to film this man’s Survivor audition. It’s too late to put any of them back into effect. I have to remember how to have a good evening inside, by myself, and quickly—before self-pity sets in. I order Indian takeout. I take a bath with a bunch of free shit I’ve been sent in the past few weeks. I write 500 words in a phone note, I sleep for 10 hours.

Thursday:

At 9:30am, he texts me a Japanese pop song. I don’t respond. I go to Gem Home for the release of a wooden spoon. It has a circular top and wavy body and looks exactly like its muse, Flynn McGarry: reedy, warm-washed, winding. My friend Gabby is there, and introduces me to her friends from Spain, Luna and Eva. Luna runs her own marketing company. Eva is an architect. She wears a one-shoulder top and drop chain earrings and not a single hair is out of place. Both are indelibly beautiful. We talk for a long time. Come to the beach, they say, in Morocco, where we harvested the stone rests for these spoons.

Lacie and Emma work at a PR company that reps Eucerin so they take me out for dinner on Eucerin’s tab. I get a burger that smells so exactly like my best friend’s dog I can’t eat it. We talk about our parents, and they tell me about Jewish Day School. Lacie has her first oyster. I place something sort of indiscernible in their behavior that makes me suspect they both have divorced parents, and they confirm this later. I take the beets home and call my dad, and we talk for two hours. It’s his 64th birthday.

Friday: I work from home in my robe, carton of raspberries for breakfast. I answer a million emails, write about Spring Sales, run interviews for saloon. In the afternoon, I sit at Prema & see Isabel, who is just back from Italy and LA. She’s writing her book, and sometimes I catch her throwing her hands up in frustration. I stay after she’s left, until 5pm. I put on a leather shirt, a silk skirt, and cowboy boots to meet Tess in the Lower East Side.

On the subway platform, I’m listening to Teenage Dream and a particular line—we can dance until we die—makes me 1. recall this song is riffing on the intensity of teenage feeling, the invincibility oft-associated with teenagers in the context of unprotected sex and drunk driving. It’s such a time for feeling, our society jests, such aroused delirium. 2. I don’t know that I ever left that intensity of feeling behind. The only difference, actually, is that now I feel empowered to act on feeling; I’m impulsive when moved. I feel the exact same intensity of feeling as I did 10 years ago. Not “dancing til I die,” but occasionally, romantically, fearless about my circumstance. None of that, really, feels behind me. I feel so strongly about everything.

At the gallery, the art is small, unframed, ambient, oil on linen, ostensibly not for sale. There’s a patio outside full of people in love; everyone is young, and gay. The wine is bad, red, viscous, and free. Tess is a recruiter in defense tech and venture capital. She loves it. She talks about drone tech, the reason VC-funded defense tech can’t take the risks government-funded defense tech can. You know, the A-bomb was government-funded, she says. Then, “You’re keeping me cultured,” as we look at the art. She pulls out a joint and we share it while she says her mission is to revive patriotism. I laugh, and ask her when she got so Republican. Her bag, from Susan Alexandra, says I <3 NY, and her wallet is Goyard. As we’re leaving she says, “I didn’t hate that, but it was like art you hang in your bathroom.” We sit at Casetta and split a bottle of wine and paté and she tells me about her sexual experiences in high school. She says it’s a waste she didn’t go to private school, and I say she would’ve been a really bad person had that happened. She sighs with relief, and says: you’re totally right.

In the car to the party, I’m thinking: I suspect fulfilled people are the ones who can locate and share their unfulfillments. Which is another way of saying confident people can speak honestly about their insecurities. I remember noticing that for the first time at college orientation. We had slept overnight under the stars and woke up covered in dew and my orientation leader said: god, gross, I woke up with boogers all over my face. I was stunned by that.

We go to a kegger in East Williamsburg. One of my friends asks me if it’s weird that she feels flattered when her boyfriend comes on her back. I say I know exactly what she means.

Saturday: I wake up hungover. I have an Alkaseltzer, and make my way to Smør for someone else to make me beans, meat and eggs. You have to pay $30 for that kind of care when you’re without-boyfriend. I take the C to the 6 to Central Park and listen to Judee Sill across the park to Cooper Hewitt. I don’t like the museum. It has all the self-consciousness you’d expect from white-curated exhibits on Blackness inside a Gilded Age mansion. I duck from the rain into Salon 94, another green flag on my Google Maps from indiscernible origin. It has tall ceilings, checkerboard floors, LED lighting, enormous warped metal structures, and a series of influencers setting up their solo shot. On my subway ride home I write the following:

A person only wanders uptown for solitude; to check on the progress of the tulips at 74th and Park, to recall the word pastiche from a million plaques, to see what temporary exhibits hang self-consciously from the walls of another Carnegie, to witness an awning flapping in the rain, the letters of COSMETIC INJECTABLES whipping in the wind; to hate once again the MetLife building for ruining the Southbound view; to wander hungry, delirious from thirst, perhaps relenting to a Sabrett hot dog in lieu of searching for the non-existent better option between 86th and 61st—but at the moment’s precipice recalling its cash-only mandate. Among the silk scarves of the Upper East Side, its marble floors, a person meanders thoughtfully from room to room, hopes that their life in all its ugly parts might look so good announced and acknowledged in ceremonial spaces. But the vitriolic whisper of chinoiserie reminds its greasy tourists that without talent or money a life never manifests in material, or permanence; a life without is only time, memory, ten thousand occasions of feeling, none of them immortalized in wallpaper. From hot dog water unto hot dog water.

In the evening, Caroline makes Molly and I steak with chimichurri, herbed couscous, and a cucumber salad. We watch Farmer Wants A Wife.

Sunday: Hannah picks me up at 7:30am in Juliet’s Subaru. We drive 30 minutes to Queens to pick up 34 biscuit orders and deliver them through Queens and into Brooklyn. It takes us 7 hours, and we end up on Ocean Parkway for our last delivery. We have been playing Elliott Smith all day, and talking about her serendipitously located Japanese ski-town crush from Sweden. We talk about my exes, why and how I love them, and how with occasion I collapse back into feeling; how I miss my most recent ex, and worry about him, and how easy it is with time apart to start misremembering. I tell her I can’t separate passion from punishment, can’t believe in something unless it’s terribly hard. We go to Tom’s Diner for a chicken caesar wrap and a tuna melt. When I get home, I fall asleep right away, and spend the rest of the evening in my room while my roommate clacks away at her knitting. We watch the White Lotus finale in separate rooms.

WHAT JULIA HARRISON THINKS YOU SHOULD DO

She’ll tell you here