January continues
Collected Agenda #27
WHAT I DID
Sunday, January 12
Ruby and I go to Bar Belly for dinner. Can we move to a table away from the bar, Ruby asks the waitress. Sitting at the bar is bad for your posture and alignment, she explains. This is another thing she's been learning at witch school. It seems that at witch school, you learn to sit and stand and then by proxy, to eat and sleep and breathe and think. Fruit and honey for breakfast, feet on the ground when you are seated with an unsupported spine. I am craving spiritual guidance, and so I soak this up like a sponge. I want to be taught how to be. This is how you wake up. This is how you shift your feet out of bed, this is how you land on the wood floor, toes first, the arches of your feet, then heels. The truth of it is my movements are products of my best but often misguided judgment. Guesses, really. For all I know, you should wake up in the morning upside down. Palms on the ground first. Heels then arches then toes. I want to learn how to be divine, but there are so many shamans and they all know best. God forbid I become sacrilegious. I certainly know myself to be fringing on this at times. Even the mention of shamans....
Ruby and I were going to go to El Salvador on Tuesday, but then I’m thinking about how I should read more before I continue my research on the ground. I visited El Salvador this summer. Later, halted my story about crypto-charter-state-red-light-therapy-benevolent-dictatorship etc etc etc. A result of overstimulation and laziness - I should deepen my roots before I return to them. Later, I'll go later.
David sends me an X Post: “Wish we lived in 1970s media economy so esquire or playboy could fly me to El Salvador and publish my 10,000-word marginally-coherent slice-of-life coverage of the crypto convention that ends with a guy in a hot tub saying something accidentally zeitgeisty.”
Ruby and I go to Forgetmenot. There’s a dog behind me, a big white husky, I hold out my hand to pet him and he gives me his paw. He does this a few times. He’s trained, I’m sure, to expect a reward in response but we’ve ordered a grill plate, there’s only halloumi left, I don’t want to poison the poor thing. Ruby posts a picture of me with the dog, but I’m in my big puffy jacket, and it mostly becomes just a picture of the dog. She tags my name on the screen. David sends me a screenshot of the picture. “DID YOU TURN INTO A DOG???” he asks.
I order David ice cream from Figo when I get home. I ate half his bread and butter even though I've been so Ray Peat and even though after, I’ve been so Keto. I've been drinking again, hence the bread. Not a lot, but I was sober for a week, and the three drinks feel jarring. I've decided to stop causing problems. I've decided to get a job at a restaurant. I like the service industry, because the job is intensely exterior. There are many things so close to me of true significance, and I'm sick of ignoring them in favor of acting like a grasping freak.
Monday, January 13
And so, you decide to redecorate again. Look at the layout of this place. There’s so much potential. There’s a big marble table and it’s cramping every corner. It’s cramping the light from the window. It’s cramping the yellow golden light that is framing our mirror. I go downstairs quickly, the light will be gone soon.
I want to get a flight tomorrow, leave with my friends and find clarity in the hot humid heat, but it doesn’t feel like I'll be absorbing myself in something more - it feels like escape, and I haven’t earned this decadence. I’ve been deliberating all day. I’ve been clutching my evil eye in case I do decide to travel. All my friends wear evil eyes, too. It’s a strange coincidence - something most people I'm drawn to share, not intentional. I'm not religious, but this is different. Adele keeps a drawer in her apartment full of evil eyes, stocked to the brim in case one charm coincidently shatters. She'll never have to go unprepared.
I take a test today. Sent, received, complete, returned. It’s so thrilling to do something I’m supposed to do.
If we got rid of the marble table…. If we lined the walls with floor pillows below the windows, their tufted fabric landing well lower than the horizon line even when stacked…. I can imagine the furniture gone. Me, staring clearly across the room, one wall to another. I'm imagining all the clutter dissipated. I imagine it would erase some sense of static.
I can imagine my hypothetical week in El Salvador, but I need to learn how to think about something outside of myself, even when I’m here. It would be better there. I can picture the airbnb in San Benito, the eight or so bedrooms, the open air layout that big homes in warm climates often share, arches bleeding into courtyards, steps built into hills, unclear where one room becomes another, wind and heat lightning swirling around you and raising your hair as your walking, even through the kitchen, even ostensibly inside. I want to swim in a big clear pool over a city that is now vaguely familiar but still, not really mine. I want to finish the story I started.
New England Winter. I need to learn how to sort things through while staying put.
David and I go to Estela for dinner. It’s our anniversary. He tells me not to say anything online about it. Private life should stay private, he says, but I’m writing it anyway. Estela is nice. It’s the sister restaurant of Altro Paradiso. My friend, Madelyn works there. Estela is smaller, cozier, you have to buzz to get into the building and then it’s up some steps, it feels like you’re in an apartment, it feels like you’re in Berlin. I’ve never been to Copenhagen, but I imagine it feels a bit like Copenhagen, too.
“I like more old timey restaurants,” David says.
“Me too,” I say. “But sometimes isn’t it nice to be in a restaurant that feels like Copenhagen?
David agrees. He’s never been to Copenhagen either.
Altro Paradiso is brightly lit, whereas Estela is dim. Stella - Latin for Star. Etc. The distinction feels a little obvious, but then, I’m being a little particular. Estela is small plates. Romantic. You can tell because you have to buzz the door to get in, and because the lighting is really dark. They put us in a little alcove by the shelves and shelves of wine. We order iberico ham, bread and butter, endive salad, crab with celery root (the best dish), squid ink fried rice with little bits of squid, steak with elderberry sauce. I order a Tito's martini, but I’m told they don’t serve Titos here. I’m told they have one martini with vodka that “tastes like smirnoff” ($22) and another with vodka that’s way better and far preferable (paraphrased) ($30). Our waitress is peppy.
“We’ll take the Smirnoff,” David says.
“She’s nice,” I say, later.
“Domineering,” David says.
Later, the waitress rolls her eyes a little when she asks me how my martini is. She smiles when I say good. I believe she is sincere in her hope that I’m happy as I guzzle up the fruits of my lowbrow taste.
It really is a lovely meal. I don’t mean to be cynical. I tell David he should tell them it’s our anniversary so we can have something free, and he tells them “it’s our anniversary, can we have dessert on the house.” Then, I’m embarrassed, but they bring us dessert (with a price) and champagne (on the house).
Tuesday, January 14
I’ve been working on maintaining constant motion. “An object in motion will stay in motion,” I’ve been telling anyone that will listen. I walk in place all day, and then I walk through Washington Square Park at night, freezing. I make sure to do an extra lap to circle under the arch, all sparkling and illuminated and icy.
I’m thirty minutes late to the Post-Doomerism talk at Gonzo’s, and this feels like an important one to me because I used to base my entire framework of thought around mitigating dread through a surrender to the inevitability of fates worse than death. It’s a terrible way to view the world - juvenile if nothing else, but also aesthetically and morally barren, limiting, a nihilistic obsession with the present does lead to destruction (yourself and others), no matter how many delusions you harbor about enlightenment, and about time and therefore preservation as false constructs. You can’t be nihilistic if you believe in good and evil, and I do believe in good and evil, so it was never going to hold up.
The lecture is just starting when I exit the elevator. The talk is between Chris Small (founder of Amazon Labor Union), PradaHorseShoe (founder of Russian Cosmism Circle NYC), Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll Podcast), and Geo Yankey (Comedian)
“Russian Cosmists think that Marx doesn't take it far enough,” Amana explains. “Marxism wants to abolish capitalism, religion, the family…. but what about abolishing the OG bummer - death.”
The point of the talk seems to be to present a sort of leftist vision of tech accelerationism. Capitalist Realism, the parts of the industrial revolution deemed actually good, nuclear fusion (clean and limitless energy which imitates the sun) instead of nuclear fission, fossil fuels , etc etc etc.
The audience, on the other hand, is mostly composed of people I recognize from other downtown events - this one taking on an uncharacteristic and somewhat academic sincerity. “Hypothetically, heat death could occur before we run out of fuel,” a girl sitting next to me murmurs at one point, evidently at least somewhat convinced by technology’s capacity for limitless good. I try to conjure a sense of what she’s imagining in my mind's eye - create enough clean energy, and you could be driving your car one day when the whole universe just implodes. This isn’t aspirational to me. Longevity even, has never been particularly aspirational to me, although increasingly moreso, I’m increasingly less cynical. I appreciate the sincerity of the lecture. I appreciate some of the ideas they put forward, too. It’s an irony-pilled audience and they're sitting in a deeply earnest room.
I slip out during the Q&A - overwhelmed, honestly, and I’m late to another function. I’m handed a gin and tonic in the Lower East Side. I’m talking about the Russian Cosmism lecture. “Lenin tried that and 20 million people died,” I am told. “I don’t really know enough,” I say. I’m sent a documentary about The Tyranny of Scientism. I order some things like the books by Nick Zurnig and Mark Fisher. It’s good to be objective. The night slips onward. It’s rude to talk about accelerationism at a party.
Wednesday, January 16
It's slightly warmer in New York today. It's still cold, but it's less frigid, I'm walking through Soho typing, I'm walking to Equinox, I'll finish writing this on the treadmill, I had such a fun night last night although I do feel terribly guilty about squandering my health and my beauty and my soul every time I get drunk. I was such a good drunk, though. I adore my friends so deeply. I adore my new friends. I think they are my best friends. I’m trying not to quantify everything. There are names of people I love spinning through my mind, now. Why order things. Some people exhaust me, and then there are other people who don’t. I’ve found new friends who live artfully while occupying a natural state that is absorbed with the physical world, recently. How lucky for me.
I don’t want to use my volatility as a bludgeon with which to bend people to my whims. Good thing I don’t feel particularly volatile this week. It’s best to consider these while outside of them. Objective introspection: am I doing a good job?
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
Gofundme + LA Fire Resources here.
Sunday, January 19
From 6pm - midnight at EARTH — Jordan Castro and Cluny present SILENCE. An evening of silence. No speaking, no phones.
From 6pm - 8pm at BCTR — DIMES SQUARE. You can read my Dimes Square Think Piece here. You should really see this, while you still can.
From 7pm at Canada — Casual Encounters and On The Rag are hosting a fundraiser to save helLa. Readings by Ariana Reines, Peter Vack, Riska Seval, Adam Wilson, and more. RSVP here. Gofundme + LA Fire Resources here.
From 7pm at KGB — Confessions is back, New Regime addition + tribute performances for David Lynch. Readings by Cassidy and Annabel, plus Jonah Howell, Christian Cail, Paul Iaacono, and Page Garcia.
From 7pm at Pangea — Penny Arcade presents ‘The Art of Becoming’ – a performance and reading. I heard Penny perform at Beckett’s TENSE, and she’s wonderful. A force worth seeing live.
Monday, January 20
From 7pm - 9pm at BCTR — DIMES SQUARE
Tuesday, January 21
From 6:30pm at Tibet House — Arden Wohl’s poetry series “The Relentless Shadow Where the Light Surrenders” returns. Featuring Alex Auder, Roddy Bottum, Lizzi Bougatsos, and Gideon Jacobs.
Wednesday, January 22
From 6pm at Hill Art Foundation — Hilton Als and David Leeming will be in conversation for the launch of Leeming’s new edition of 1998 biography Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney.
From 6pm - 8pm at The Swiss Institute — Opening reception for Nolan Oswald Dennis: Overturns. SI was my first internship in New York, and they consistently present great programming and fun openings. With Overturns - “Dennis traverses the subterraneans of what they call a “black consciousness of space,” a multivalent conceptual framework for exploring the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.”.
Thursday, January 23
From 7pm at 4 Berry Street— Limousine presents a reading featuring Jordan Codley, Iva Dixit, Jeremy Gordon, Ama Kwarteng, and Iva Dixit. Bring your Ins and Outs for 2025, and the readers will provide feedback.
From 7pm at EARTH — Simone Films presents a night with Alex Zhang Hungtai and Will August Park.
From 7pm at Skinos (123 Washington St) — The Drift hosts their Issue Fourteen Launch Party. Free for print subscribers, or $20 for admission + a print issue.
Friday, January 24
From 6:30pm at The Back Room — Substack presents Burns Night - “a night of scotch & murder by words.” Readings by Alex Auder, Emily Sundberg, Natasha Stagg, Nate Silver, and more.
From 8pm at EARTH — Heavy Traffic Reading featuring Sheila Heti, Amalia Ulman, Sean Thor Conroe, Sam Kriss, and Ada Antoinette. This will be great - very excited. Come early, because it will also probably be packed.
Saturday, January 25
From 7pm at Heart House — Extreme Animals presents “Should I Delete My Channel?” - VHS Tape Release Show with Callahan & Witscher and DJ Cool Groceries. Tickets $15 in advance / $20 at the door.
From 7pm - 10pm at Nublu — Lucky Henry, Beau, Dogwood Hill, and Boston Flowers preform
From 10pm - 4am at MoodRing — Kim Uong (and others) are hosting a Lunar New Year Party. Sounds for The Year of the Snake by Chinatown Records and more.
Sunday, January 26
From 7pm at Lubov — A night of plays and performances with Ben Lipkin, Peter Vack, Alice Aster, Zoey Greenwald, and the Board of Ethics (True + Jamison) – “A Return to Form! We are serious people. Whatever happened to intention? Conviction? Decorum?”
happy anniversary <3