Monday
Preston, Connecticut
Everything in the woods is still and stone and snow, which is the sort of place that’s nice to be when there is Saturn going into Aries moon and the lent beginning and compulsions-to-be-writing-everything-down and some other omens, too, that I am hoping to believe in. Lots of sounds and smells to float in between, and best to be kind of light about it. Nothing so wrong with seeking purity in pure places. I am sitting by the fire pressed against a warm stone floor, and the clock just struck midnight. I was waiting for the clock to strike midnight, because I was waiting for a new week to begin. Nothing feels too different. A few days ago, when the clock struck midnight and it was Friday-the-thirteenth, I was sitting in a glass apartment in the sky surrounded by things that don’t belong to me. Kind of beige and huge place with stock-image-skyline views and a lot of rumors swirling regarding who the apartment belonged to, but no one famous ever actually shows up. In the huge marble bathroom, I sized myself up in the unnervingly clean mirror and felt fifty-percent-miserable and fifty-percent-fun. I went home after that, and in the morning, it was hazy dawn and the day was not feeling particularly unlucky though I knew better than to get complacent. I waited kind of breathless, and when the clock struck midnight again and the curse was lifted, I donned normal clothes and hailed a cab and arrived at a party full of diet-mountain-dew and magazines about Japan. You’re late, my friends said. You’re superstitious. You’re drinking red bull but it’s one am and you’re wearing normal clothes and listening to a DJ in a normal room and the playlist is normal and everyone keeps introducing themselves by alias like ‘Pretty Girl’ or ‘Whatever.’ I was given gifts and hats and pamphlets and the night was nice because my mind was crystal clear. I spent the next day waiting kind of breathless. I took the six-line to the metro-north to southwest station to harlem-valley where I stood outside on a winter-warm evening. Blue hour dusk. Looked over at an abandoned mental hospital on one side and an Evangelical Center on the other side, across the road. The abandoned mental hospital had a sign in a cracked window etched in bright blue duct tape and the sign said WAIT. The sky was turning dark with streaks of something sort of cotton candy pale, and my father called to say he was late because of house fires along the road. All my annoyance at tardiness and stranded state and train station strips between abandoned institutions dissipated in an instant. WAITING by the cracked windows and duct-tape-text in blue. The Evangelical Center had been meant to open ten years ago, but the buildings were loaded with asbestos and mold, and so it never did. My father arrived on dirt roads out of winter mist with headlights like a beam. I considered my allegiances and decided they align mostly with places like here. You wouldn’t think that in Connecticut you could find places so open road empty with absolutely nothing around, my father and I remarked. We drove under covered bridges and over frozen rivers. When we arrived at the cabin, there were vertical nordic skis jutting out from the snowbanks and the driveway remained totally iced over. We had coq-de-vin for dinner, and I did not have any wine.
The town in Connecticut is close enough to New York City, and no one really answers when I fire off some questions about commuter-local-population-ratios. Close to the house, there is a cognitive behavioral therapist who lays patients out on a couch in a hut that is mostly glass and a little bit of wood, and is hovering over the river. Who needs therapy when you have a view like that, everyone says, every time we drive past the hut. Nobody needs therapy if they have access to the outdoors and the capacity for lifestyle interventions, I pipe up, because while I have been trying to be less petulant-for-no-reason, sometimes there is a reason for petulance being; it is nice to say the opposite thing, and sometimes the opposite thing I am saying is true. The hut is not really that close by. There is a long driveway and lots of silent snow. There is a typewriter in the window, and everything is made of soft carved wood. Some of the wood is painted blue, but for the most part, the stain is gentle tan. I am sitting by the fire and I am taking some satisfaction in boxing things up. Tinned salmon and a heart shaped bowl. White socks and pearl earrings and a beautiful hand made card. A candle and a very pretty bookmark. Soon, sunlight will begin to stream through the open windows, and I hope that when this process begins, I will sleep through it totally unaware. The house is very quiet, and I have become very happy. Earlier, Celia came downstairs and she asked me why I was still awake. I don’t go to sleep til six-am, I said, which was an obstinate and kind of juvenile response. Oh really, Celia said, and she shook her head with vague indifference. I’m veiling my diaries in pretension in lieu of anonymity, I explained. Everyone’s been super into only saying things that are true, Celia shrugged. I wish it was still summer so I could say what I mean, I said. Celia looked at me kind of gently. How would it being summer change things regarding saying what you mean?, she asked.
Upstairs, I turned on a rainforest stone shower and stood under the water and winter skylight looking up at stretches of dark and stretches of stars. Celia caught me on the landing on the stairway as we circled our way back through this beautiful and strange house. Sun due to come up soon. Navy and white carved clock above me. Handmade wooden cover over the refrigerator so that even the appliances are beautiful. Maybe you’d be happier if you wrote about something other than yourself, Celia said. True, I said. Everyone moving like ghosts in the shadows up all night in a cabin surrounded by snow and full of lofts and quits and beautiful food and drink.
Tuesday
Life-in-a-lab
In my dream, the house was a lab. I woke up to light not just streaming no, but flooding, absolutely pouring through the long glass windows in front of me. I knew that once the light cleared, I would be staring into the heart of this lab. I knew it was a problem that I was anticipating waking up in a lab, because I knew that I should have been anticipating a morning waking up at home. Instead, I was finding myself totally nonplused about waking up in a lab. The important thing, I knew, as I woke up with a sense of increasing urgency, was to conjure up an image of a home, not a lab. You have been in a lab for so long that you have forgotten about home, a very confident voice inside my head was saying. A picture of my childhood bedroom appeared in a few frames. Different versions. Big white bed and blue wooden floors and presently frosty fields behind the house. Little twin bed yellow walls, carpeted floors, and hot summer cornfields outside. I couldn’t get it straight. If I was in a lab, then I needed to remember. You need to remember a place that actually exists, the lab-attendants were saying in my dream. Saying in my head. Glass apartment in the sky. Room at The Marlton Hotel. I’ve been eating vegetables and collecting things like dried flowers and books on Esoteric Health and buying wash-and-fold laundry service and being swept away to places like nice restaurants with no menus and nice-apartments-with-no-owners. I woke up in Connecticut. Can’t wake up in a lab if you never go to sleep.
In the morning, I woke up at close to noon. I shared photos on The Internet of a very aesthetically-cohesive and un-lab-like home. I went to the bathroom to wash my face and collect myself as best I could. The house was beautiful, and I was unsure as to why I was watching things unfold from as if I was somewhere else. I made lists of things that were special, being places like this most of all. I made lists of things that compose self respect, and then I made lists of things that compose a life that is bright and white and full of light. The country is quiet and sometimes difficult for me, though I sleep through the night now and this changes everything. Downstairs, the dogs and Celia and the other were sitting under high lofted ceilings. There was a magical and silvery presence that mediation gives to a person. I asked about coffee and they told me there was coffee in the pot and I could heat it up in a silver bowl on the stove. The stove was green and handmade and you turned it on by flicking little metal burner switches. The bowl was nice and very small. I poured the coffee in the bowl and I waited for everything to begin to boil. I added vital proteins collagen and also oat milk creamer and also lots of white sugar because the esoteric health advice of the age says this is fine. There were homemade mini muffins from The Smith Bakery down the street on the counter (blueberry, morning harvest, strawberry corn, and chocolate chip) and so I cut each muffin in half, and then I had one-half-of-each. Two mini muffins total. I put two of the halves in the toaster, and I had two of the halves cold. Everyone started telling me about gnosticism and buddhism and catholicism. They recommended to me a friend who writes about God and married into a famous band. They recommended I come to meditate in places like New York, too. You look ready, Celia said, as I packed up my north face back-pack and changed out of split-sweatpants and banaa-republic-black-top. I’m not, I snapped, in response. Do you actually want to meditate more, Celia asked. I don’t say I want to do things I don’t actually want to do, I replied. I could not stop with all this harshness.
Wednesday
Grand Central Station
Back in New York City and I am totally covered in dog hair. Shoes untied in Grand Central Station but there is nowhere for me to stop and tie them without risking some sort of stampede or at least massive inconvenience and so onward we go. A man just walked towards me rapidly and I flinched and then felt kind of bad. Then, he shouted; young lady can I ask you a question and so now I do not feel bad. My instincts were correct, and now I do not feel bad at all. Ok, fine, whatever. I used to love arriving back in New York and hearing all the music and the lights and I would twirl through this place nonpulsed. Then, I would twirl home. I used to get drunk-before-christmas at the midtown Cipriani and then giggle when people called my ex-boyfriend and I bad-people-for-cutting on the trains toward Albany, but I’m not allowed to move like that anymore. I used to sink into sixty-dollar taxi-cabs because I found the subway over-stimulating. My Prada purse used to be lined with shiny leather, but I got fidgety somewhere tropical and I ripped it all off so now we’re working with something more flattened and matte. Teenage girls used to fling themselves at the side of the train platforms, and conductors used to lose their whole crew in Boston and train heists used to happen. I used to consider everything to be pretty taken-care-of. I think I never used to notice when sometimes, problems would arise. On the train ride back to New York, tonight, the tracks were icy and slick and it was already kind of blue hour dusk. When I said goodbye, I told Celia I love you I love you I love you a million times over because I felt slightly neurotic about a weekend full of being slightly late and slightly harsh. I am smart enough to know that the only thing complaining makes you better at is complaining, so I decided to stop. In Grand Central Station, they are playing live music, and I watch a man propose, though no one else around the soon-to-be newlyweds reacted. No photos or energy. Sad. I am wearing beat up Ganni knee high boots and Brandy Melville long sleeved dress, and Zara blazer that I stole from Paul’s Baby Grande back when I was in the practice of going lots of places and stealing lots of things. I miss my Max Mara coat that I left at “tech week” and I miss “drinking” and I am suddenly desperate to be out the door. I imagine that when the subway doors fly open and I burst out free and all-in-one piece, I will see the Washington Square Park arch, and it will be glowing silver in mid-winter light. I imagine that the city will feel warm with soon-to-be-spring-humidity. I imagine that since groundhog day has come and gone the tides will change soon, and I imagine I will relinquish my Groundhog Day (1993) fantasies of nothing-ever-happens at some point down the line, when it all becomes a bit too much to take. Tomorrow, I will be taking my shoes to the tailor and then the next day, I will have a totally fresh new crop of things to wear. I imagine that soon, I will have a fresh new crop of things to consider.
Thursday
Whore Dialectics
Greenwich Village’s bitcoin bar sports a libertarian clientele and taxidermy and a podcast studio and beef-tallow-fries. Tonight, it sports a projector screen from my old apartment that looks sad and small propped on stage, and a big audience in metal chairs, and a birthday party in the front room, and plenty of opportunities to make myself feel useful as I tinker with film equipment and fire off texts regarding “promotional material.” I am sitting at Pubkey Bar drinking a diet coke while I wait for the screening of “Whore Dialects” to begin. When I ordered my diet coke at the bar, a strange man made a strange joke about NA beer, and I felt immediately irritated and restrained by my self imposed limits. I am listening to a group of young men discuss the career path of “Internet Pervert” as one of the only viable post-AI jobs. Monetize your self destruction, they are saying. Male prostitution. Buying plushies is to women as buying porn is to men. There’s a strange pseudo-intellectual glare to it all and I am enjoying listening in. They are talking about Brian Kaplan, but they keep on mispronouncing his name. They are talking about scientists, rationalists, and flexible proposals. When they talk about Internet Perverts, there are stars in their eyes, less because of the sex, it seems, and more because the internet perverts are able to get some money and get some attention. The male influencer. That seems to be what they are starry eyed about. They are thrilled to be in the same extended universe as someone who might be able to garner some vague attention. This is a bar that usually makes me feel kind of hazy. This is a bar where I used to make scenes. Enough reminiscing, because I am here to watch a film that is all about auto-documentarians, which is in sharp contrast to the maladjusted forms of auto-diary or auto-fiction.
In the film, a beautiful girl is in the back of a car with the wind in her face and she is drinking an Erewhon smoothie and talking about how Hollywood is dead and the monasteries are empty and you can’t be a nun or get a phd because you question what truth is, and these institutions just won’t let you get at it. After that, the film cuts to a scene where the girl is in a white dress being play-drowned in the ocean by a right-wing provocateur. The film crew sent the provocateur to stay with the girl, and it was kind of the perfect setup, a voiceover explains. The provocateur describes how when he arrived, the girl was in a state of almost total abjection. Like how kids who are sexually assaulted don’t shower to make themselves totally disgusting and unappealing, he explains. I find the provocateur slightly less interesting as a character than both the girl, and the disgraced art-advisor (another prominent character in the film) but I like when he argues about politics and then reconciles on a personal level with those around him in places like California. I like the scenes about the professionally fraught yet personally friendly relationship between the art advisor and his not terribly successful clients, ie the clients are disappointed but still use the advisor’s pool for summer swims. The client still dreams of having an eighteen person studio because this means tremendous success, and because this is just how men dream. When the provocateur is described but not depicted as losing control, it is explained that the jig is kind of up, because it’s no triumph of power to reign over somebody who is not even in control of themselves. I only watch the film once and I am not taking notes, really, during the public screening at the Bitcoin Bar, but I like it because it is auto-documentary not auto-fiction or auto-diary and as such, it is very precise. The film says, for someone like me in the conditions like the ones I occupy, here is what life is like. This is more matter of fact and less indulgent than saying; here is what life is like for me. At a party last month that was also all about art whores, the filmmakers wrote a few lines about a few of my friends. The women present were on average quite a bit younger than the men and looked fresh. Perhaps because of their age, or perhaps because of the care they put into their bodies and minds, but the vibe among the women was optimistic and exuberant. I thought this was nice. Nice, too, to catch purity in unexpected places while staying totally true.
Friday
Upper West Side
Later, I am uptown and I am thinking about how I can become more self-disciplined so I can become more interesting. I am watching Pierre Le Fou at Lillian’s apartment on the Upper West Side and all the girls are dressed like characters in the film. Lilian keeps leaning out the window with a long skinny cigarette and I am drinking a glass of Sancerre because I just can’t quit. In this film, a very small man is holding a gun to a very beautiful girl’s head while she cuts her hair. The beautiful girl has a brunette bob, and she is wearing a red dress. The film is full of primary colors and very bright paint. When a man is stabbed, he bleeds red paint. Before a man explodes himself in dynamite at the end of the film, he paints himself blue. I like the film because the colors of the gore are all bright and fake like paint, and the colors of the scenery are all pastel and muted and lovely like real life. Summer in The Riviera. Beautiful people living a simple and crime-filled life. I have not watched very many films this year because I’ve been busy writing thirty-thousand-words-about-myself-per-week. In the last film I watched, a Japanese cat was exploded by a grenade, and when gore and guts spilled everywhere, I flinched and clenched my eyes shut. Do you want to leave, my friend asked, and what I wanted was to be resilient, but what I said was I don’t really care. Now, a girl in the film is sitting on a boat with a man, and she is talking about how the two have only known each other for a few million seconds. She’s such a stupid girl, Lillian says. I would say something like that, I respond. One-million-billion-seconds and one-million-billion-words. I am feeling bubbly when I am not feeling sick or shy. I am feeling like it’s time to be more light about it. When I look to my left, I see beautiful stained glass lamps and a defense surveillance tech-branded throw blanket. When I look to my right, I see an open window and all my friends leaning too far outside smoking skinny vogues. On the Internet, people are talking about how things are only interesting if they are true. Determinative reasoning then says, one should make what is true more interesting. Everything just became crystal clear. By which I mean, everything is operating on material terms now.
DIRECTORY
The full event calendar is now going to live on The Aleph - an exciting new platform by Noah Kumin of The Mars Review of Books. The Aleph is a marketplace and membership club for the arts, with an emphasis on supporting in-person events, production, and funding for artists. Programming featured will be intentional and curated, and include more opportunities for early-access and invitation-only events. If you would like to submit an event for consideration, please email me at chloegpingeon@gmail.com. Apply to join The Aleph here
I will still be featuring select events on the blog, along with more eclectic or personal recommendations, news, and guest features. To start:
David Rimanelli is perhaps my favorite person to follow on Instagram, as well as one of my favorite critics. Tonight, from 6:30pm at Tibet House, he will be reading, along with Kiely Sweatt and Sean Fabi. Tickets here.
Also tonight: Wednesday, February 25 from 10pm - late at Night Club 101 — AceMo, Christian Tokyo, and Jetexpresso play a techno, house, psychedelic club show. Tickets here.
Tomorrow: Thursday, February 26 from 7pm at Night Club 101 — A night of readings with Benin Gardner, Ruby Hoffman, Ruby McColister, Jess Wolfsohn, Emma Callahan, and Allyson Joanerwin.
Whore Dialectics, reviewed in above blog, is available to watch here
Pierrot Le Fou, enjoyed in the above blog, will be screening at Film Forum on March 21 at 3:45pm, and March 26 at 6:45pm.
I went to Oceans last week for a seafood “plateau” and very dirty martini, and while I tend to dislike cavernous restaurants and find them to be expense-account adjacent, this one was very good and tons of fun. Gramercy in general is very good and tons of fun, despite the Eataly-esque reputation. The walking tours of Gramercy are rumoured to be great, mostly insofar as many of the current facades are built directly over preserved original facades, and because there used to be a lot of fabulous parties thrown by interesting characters, here. The Municipal Arts Society hosts tours sometimes.
Molly Young wrote a nice review of David Fishkind’s recent debut Don’t Step Into My Office (Arcade Publishing). — “clearly the author is a madman… a madman in full command of his powers.” Buy the book here
Love Thanks will be hosting a popup at 41 Orchard Street from March 1 to March 15. I tend to wear the same thing every day and as such don’t really have shopping recommendations. However, I really love everything in this collection and am excited to go by in person.
Some miscellaneous book recommendations in slightly more esoteric vein that I received from trusted sources this week: This Tremendous Lover (Eugene Boylan, 1946), The Jewel Ornament of Liberation (Gampopa), The Gnostic Gospels (Elaine Pagels, 1979). More on esoteric books soon <3
I love when your dad picks you up and takes you to the country
Nice to read, I see different things every time I read your text