Humanoid-Robots

#81

Monday

Humanoid robots

Before the once-in one-hundred-years snow-storm, the air was soft and warm and not even that still, and so no one could believe what was about to come. I spent all day thinking about winter cleaning, but I did not spring into action until late. Then, I pulled on a black Gil Rodriguez dress, and I walked to buy Celsius, get on the train, drift over to downtown for a book launch, whilst feeling tired yet optimistic. Sam was sitting behind the bar next to a huge bison head and a lot of Olympic memorabilia, and he told me that Ellie was there and New-York-University girls were there and not Saiorse, yet, who is terminally late. Downstairs, the lounge was open and dark and I mixed myself a drink full of Campari syrup and ginger and gin. I went upstairs and I sat at the bar and Sam made me a Roy Rogers which is a Shirley Temple but for boys. Saiorse arrived in a gray dress and boots, and she made me a glass of melon juice. Lily arrived, and she told Sam that she only drinks diet coke. After that, we walked over through the still warm enough night to a penthouse party full of people who make robots. This, or a dive-bar. This, or Soho House. This or homeward bound. Choose your own adventure. Humanoid robots are designed to do physical things that humans do like serve food at restaurants, and to potentially also have superior intellect and perhaps become agentic-not-mimetic, Saiorse explained. She explained something of a sort of space-race to get this show-on-the-road. Cold War. I was thinking more in hypotheticals. I hadn’t really been invited. I have not had existential dread since summer, when I moved out of a glass apartment where I was always staring up at terminally blinking skies. I only ever said I was a nihilist when I didn’t know what that word meant. At the party, there were trays and trays of sushi and a spiral staircase and men carrying around platters of dumplings. Everyone from the Stanford class of twenty-two is here, Sam said. A lot of people flew in for this party, he explained. Saiorse and I maneuvered our way to the bar, and then towards a long counter top that appeared to be a buffet, but was totally untouched. Lily and Saoirse and I began to eat everything on display. Grabbing plates of salmon and being greedy. A girl standing in the center of the room was saying she felt dizzy. Does anyone else feel dizzy, she was asking. Yes, I decided. Yes indeed I do, and so I went to the bathroom but the door was just one big plywood sheath with no lock, and the music that was fired up throughout the whole huge vast apartment was pumping out from two small speakers that were located here. Blaring Ye so loudly from out of the bathroom ceiling and from under the sink. It felt kind of like a strange and architectural dream. Not like a bad dream, but like I had to go. The girl in the center of the room had reminded me that I was feeling dizzy. She disappeared by the time I came back to the party, and I tried to tell my friends about the strange and blaring bathroom music but they were absorbed in things that seemed hyper and happy and totally present. Nobody seemed too future-oriented despite the product at hand, but they never do at these sorts of things. The books on display all had colorful spines and recognizable titles. I did say goodbye, and outside, the snow had still not started.

Tuesday

Night Time Routine

I am not a robot. In the morning, I want to get sunlight in my eyes and I want to wear a Tankair black tank top and Rag and Bone green cargo pants and Petrucci ballet flats and big wired headphones. In the night, I want goat milk elixirs and Angelmoon dresses and answers and ideas to float through my phone. When it is nighttime, I love to play on my phone. It is night and the window is open and I am feeling quite happy with myself, though believe it-or-not I do have a tendency to let things ebb and flow. White noise meditation outside my window, but it’s just listening to the turtle pond churn day old water right below me in the courtyard, and listening to day-four-snow melt in big fast drops off the roof. Snow melts fast and then it’s no-longer-magic-outside. I am not totally ready for spring to begin. I am not totally ready to be old or even bored or to go to sleep most nights before the sun is high in the sky. This is why I leave the windows open. This is why I put on black silk eye mask. This is why I live in New York City, totally out of sync with nature, totally in sync with the dictations of my whims. I am lying with the lights off and I am totally ready for Pi (1998) to begin on my computer. My least favorite thing about myself is my tendency to let things ebb and flow. My favorite thing about myself is my ability to notice patterns and symbols and other sorts of interesting and mysterious and astral or perhaps just normal projections in everything everywhere and particularly in real life. While I wait for Pi (1998) to begin, my computer is flashing words and sounds and symbols about Cyriossis took my wings and winter drab and summer glam and being honest with your clients about the effects of their lifestyle. When Pi (1988) begins, a series of patterns and symbols and pumping rock music and black and white imagery will flash across my computer screen. When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so once when I was six I did, Sean Gullete will say. One-eight-one-eight-one-eight, he will say. He will walk past a tai chi class in the park and solve math problems with a small child in his building. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge, he will say. He will talk about the stock market and the universe of numbers and he will live-blog-his-day. 11:52; personal note, he will say. 11:52: Not a pattern In the mornings, I like to live-blog-my-days, but it’s not so much the numerological sort of thing. I like to go on vacation. I like to give up vice. I am feeling totally thrilled about the trajectory of things. Failed treatments to date, they are saying in Pi (1998): beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, adrenaline injections, high doses of ibuprofen, steroids, trager mentastics, violent exercise, caffeine, acupuncture, marijuana, percodan, midrin, tenormin, sansert, and homeopathics. Failed treatments to date: rock climbing, chess, caution-to-the-wind, throwing everything out again-and-again-and-again. Numerology. Event calendar. 2016. IFC screening. Total isolation. Total consumption. Total sweetness policy. I’m not really treating anything. Moreso, I am just writing it all down.

Wednesday

Thai Diner

In the summer, when the air was sickly sweet and I was feeling ill but knew the day would be ok to pass in the sort of languid-and-waiting-for-it-to-end kind of way, we took a CitiBike over towards Thai Diner. We biked along the Hudson River, first. In Riverside Park, I stopped alongside the dinosaur playground and the firefighter memorial and I touched the shiny metal heads of all these structures left behind. My companions were irritated yet understanding of this divergence. We biked to the George Washington Square Bridge after that, and Jennifer jumped in the dirty water, and Riley vomited off the pier. Back downtown, the air was humid and heavy and the wait outside Thai Diner was long, which made everyone feel kind of claustrophobic if not necessarily physically worse. Not traditional not traditional not traditional, Ian kept on saying. Kicking rocks around Chinatown. He liked this place nonetheless. Thai Diner is cartoonishly bright and the greenhouse heats quickly and it is not the sort of place to visit during summer storms. When the rain started, Ian and I walked to the chocolate factory. At the chocolate factory, he bought me sweets painted like portraits and water colors and little mini worlds. Best chocolates in the world, he kept on saying. I unwrapped the chocolates like little parcels, and we both found them to be quite a delight. Thai Diner is kind of Michelin-star style. Really good food. Mango and coconut sticky rice. Curries and fried cod. Every bite delights, but all I can really remember is we were all too sick or maybe just too hot to eat. I ordered hot toddy because it’s good to drink warm things when warm, and it’s good to drink strong things when hands are shaking at the cedar wood counter of a nice restaurant, and friends are dripping Hudson River water all over the floor. Ian ordered a smoothie that was green and piled high with coconut-flakes. Get me out of here, he kept on saying. I love this place, he said. I feel so goddamn bad. Get me a cab right now. We went home after that, and the greenhouse roof at home made the whole place boil and so I fell asleep easily, even midday. I think I fell asleep for the rest of the year, or at least the afternoon.

Winter, now, and the snow is starting to come down fast and steep but it’s not yet sticking. It is dark outside mostly from the storm but a little bit from the normal evening setting in. I am in my room and I am listening to the turtle pond and also Tango In the Night (1987). The music and the water from the pond are loud, because the snow has made everything else quiet. Waiting for a taxi cab in the snow. Taxi cabs are like space ships in the sleet. One has to take a taxi cab, because the air and pavement have become too slippery to walk. Once one takes a taxi cab down the block, one wonders if one will be able to get home. Seems kind of silly to be going to Thai Diner in the snow, but I like how everything kind of hovers before the storm. At Thai Diner, there are purge alerts blaring on my phone. Apocalyptic ideation is such a narcissistic preoccupation. The greenhouse seating has been sheathed in plastic strips and heat lamps, and the restaurant looks even brighter in the dark. I wear a big black coat that I stole from a nightclub back when I was in the habit of going to nightclubs and stealing things. My philosophy with teenage-stealing was always an eye-for-an-eye. If someone took my coat, I would reach into the pile and take home whatever came up first. It’s not good to be transactional in this way. Never really sought redemption. Never really learned to drive in snow, and so wheels-on-ice and taxi-cabs sliding through stop lights are making me feel nostalgic. Teenage boys are taking photos in the snow. Crab fried rice and martini in the snow, because it’s good to drink cold-things-when-cold and because the weather and the cycles repeat and repeat and repeat. No chaos, except sometimes, out of the storm, a person walks along the street and I watch them through the plastic like I am watching T.V. Then, just when they are about to leave my line of vision, they fall or maybe fling themselves against the side of the building. Later, the trees outside will be weighed down with heavy snow. The branches won’t look like skeletons. Everything will look larger-than-life. When I look outside from a very certain angle, I will be able to imagine a forest. I will be able to imagine the Arctic. Don’t fucking ever do that again, the people at the table over are saying. They are talking to their phones. Purge alerts on everyone’s phone. Whatever.

Thursday

Quitting

I have decided to quit vice because unless I take my self-experimentation seriously, nothing interesting is going to happen. I don’t take so much pleasure in denying myself the things that I want. At The Marlton Hotel lobby, I was two hours late to meet my aunt for lunch and hungover and she called my father and asked if I was maybe in El Salvador again or perhaps just kidnapped. Small box apartment. No greenhouse roof. I wore an A-line skirt and Banana-Republic-black-top and picked my way across sunlight-streaming in Washington Square Park to arrive late and empty handed. I ran into Olivia in the hotel lobby, and she was glowing with discipline-of-lent and the sign of the cross in black ash on her forehead. I can’t become religious because I can’t even deny myself the things I want, I’d told Joe, a few days earlier. I hadn’t been drinking that night. Well you know what they say about failure rendering humility, he had said, in response, with a smile. And he’d admired my sincerity. And I’d admired his generosity. He’d recommended some literature. This Tremendous Lover (Eugene Boylan, 1946). I’d purchased the texts on ThriftBooks.com and then I’d fallen to sleep listless. Things became worse and then better. In The Marlton Hotel lobby, my aunt asked me if I liked when bad things happened because bad things help my writing. I HATE when bad things happen, I said in response. I HATE when I suffer. I do not WANT to be resilient. I cited a few of my favorite authors who-never-suffered. I like early Babitz and Fanny HOWE, I decreed. I like the-architecture-of-happiness and feng shui and feeling observational. Fanny Howe is kind of sad, my aunt shrugged in response. I hate her POETRY, I said. I picked at my avocado and smoked salmon and did not do so well at modulating my voice. Anyways, it’s more fun though sometimes risky to view measures of necessity as measures of languid experimentation. But nothing interesting happens when nothing gets better or nothing gets worse. And as already mentioned, I hate when things get worse.

Things are becoming interesting again. Themes of my stories include: copying, rage, seven-deadly-sins, homesteading, wyoming, san salvador, lucis trust, morning routine, drinking routine, night time routine, hotel lobbies, five-star-hotels, spirit airlines, palm beach, network states, ballet flats, event calendar, patronage, patronage networks, geneva, venice biannale, canne, party hosting, weight lifting, rock climbing, publicity, st theresa de avila, underwater communication cables, oil rigs, satellites, social clubs, numerology, patterns and symbols, gnosticism, federal agents, effective altruism, rationalism, catholicism, weaponized incompetence, self obsession, self obsession, self obsession, self obsession, disassociation, disembodiment, embodiment, new york city, massachusetts, glass apartments in sky, gray rocky shores, los angeles california, carmel california, san diego california, ventura highway, silver springs, cults, friends, surfing, architecture

You called [redacted] a bitch at The Chelsea Hotel, I told Matthew, with glee, at The Bitcoin Bar, tonight. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that, he said. You did, you did, [redacted] told me, I said. Well all women are kind of bitches, he said. Not me, I said. You’re kind of a bitch, he said. I’m totally sweet, I said. You’re ok, he said. Then, he ate some of my beef-tallow-french-fries, though I polished most of them off all on my own. This is another thing that will have to go, now that I’m giving up vice. If I am going to have vice, it must certainly be vice that’s fun. No more things-I-want. No more french-fries and nicotine-pouches and pickle-martinis and inciting-conflict-at-the-detriment-of-myself-and-my-community.

Friday

Morning Routine

It is morning and the day feels kind of bright and nice. I am in my room and I am feeling sweet. I am in my room and it is feeling a little bit messy. I am listening to Drasticism which is the new album by a girl who’s playing a show tonight and I am thinking I would perhaps like to go. Listening to a sweet kind of diy soft music that reminds me of crystals. I kind of want to be by the water. I kind of want to learn guitar with my friends. I kind of want sunlight on my face first thing in the morning. I want everything I own to be from Angelmoon and Ebay and LoveThanksWorld. I’d like to be in salt water in Costa Rica or perhaps Brazil but I am trying not to want things outside the present so much. Listening to “Angelica” by Bella Litsa and “If You Were Around” by Celestine Manno and “Yellow House” by Satya and I never listen to new music but it all can’t stop reminding me of crystals. My morning routine is a fantasy land. My morning routine is real life. My window is open and I can say hello to the turtles swimming in the churning water beneath me. Smell of jasmine, orange trees, salted air the song is saying. Something about California. Sweet and lovely. I am thinking of everything on such sweet terms. My morning routine is Current Body LED red light mask and water out of a metal flask and ten minute guasha routine and walk to the Italian cafe for one little morning coffee. One little morning coffee because I just quit everything. I quit everything all at once. We will see what gives.

DIRECTORY

Reminder that the full event calendar now lives on The Aleph

Tonight – from 10pm at Night Club 101 — NK is throwing a rager. Hosted by Blizzy McGuire and Jacob Ace. Sounds by DJ Thank You, Ali RQ, Bruno Zero, DJ Kellen, and Sank. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Just show up.

Sunday, March 8 from 8pm at Night Club 101 — Nikoleta Juvnovic and Erina McSweeney present another iteration of Slide Show. I’m super excited about this - a Nan Goldin inspired gathering of photographs, conversation, and performance.

Monday, March 9 from 7pm at Night Club 101 — Narrative Party & calendar launch. Another fun one. Hosted by Narrative Warriors. I love Monday Night Parties and I love interesting calendars.

Appendix: Things Brandy Melville depop boatneck long sleeve dress, Zalt electrolyte zyn, Davolls tee-shirt, Angelmoon, Imperfaite, Prada boots, Monroe suede penny loafers, Frye leather riding boot Places Thai Diner, Vince’s Cobbler, The Manhattan Club, The Marlton Hotel, Tartinery, Caffe Reggio, Dr. Clark, Swan Room Read GirlInsides, The Masque of the Read Death, Fatherland (Victoria Shorr, 2026) Watch Pi (1988), The Biggest Sabotage in History (weird documentary youtube), A Place in the Sun (1951) Listen Gregarian Chants (via Health Gossip), Tango In The Night (1987), Drasticism (2026).