The Strangest Hotel in New York
#44 Collected Agenda
WHAT I DID
Saturday, April 12
I am back on the train to New York - I had to come and go and come and go again. It feels a little like wading through the muck, all this coming and going, particularly when there was this period of being all twitchy and discontent here, and particularly because now, this time, returning to the city this time unlike on some other occasions, I can suddenly remember all that there is here to miss here.
It feels like Fall in New York. This is really throwing me for a loop - knowing that it is Spring but it could not feel more like Fall. Flying back into the city on Wednesday evening, the trees looked all orange and glowing as we circled in on them from above. My dad pulled over the car last night in Vermont to enjoy the snow.
Do you appreciate things like when you’re lying on a porch and the air is so hot you can’t really move and you drink a beer with your friends and you feel drunk from it but you might just be drunk from the heat,” I ask my dad. “Or would you prefer to just always be in snow?”
“You’re making that sound nice, but I would find the heat suffocating,” my dad says.
Just like it was from the plane, the trees are orange on the amtrak back to the city, too. I’ve never noticed spring as orange like this before. I’m noticing it now because I’ve been surrounded by all green in the tropics. It’s just that there are still no leaves on these empty branches, and the air is getting brighter, the air is getting twinged with budding flowers and evening haze. It’s not autumn. There are optical illusions. Everything here will be coming to life, soon.
This week, there is a lot to do. I realized that suddenly. The conclusion was to zoom on back towards the city. That is where I am now. The story is almost there. I haven’t worked on something to completion like this, before. It’s not a matter of length or time or even attention it’s more so, just, I’ll be breaking the habit of being all loose and touch and go about it.
Sunday, April 13
After a day spent on your phone, you do wake up and it feels all gray. Sun, water, in my dreams I was swinging on a rope swing into a swimming hole in the jungle over and over and over again - a little ominous in energy but it was certainly very beautiful there.
Anyways, you can bring things back into sharp focus if you latch onto momentum and if you view inertia with disdain and disregard. It's not too complicated. You go in circles sometimes, but this does not have to continue.
A return to the pace of things: an hour of walking briskly on the treadmill at an upscale corporate gym. Walk faster; and then thoughts move faster. Edit and publish the diaries I culled from the Internet this week. Gem Home for trout toast. They had to get rid of the open seating plan because it was starting to feel like a WeWork, the waiter tells Natasha. Now it feels like Vermont in Nolita. Nice and sweet. I am not too cynical even if it is candlelit at noon, which feels like some sort of cosplay in the context of Nolita.
I take the F to the 7 to the Whitney Claflin show at Moma Ps1 in the evening. I've never been here before, and I like that the museum feels all cavernous. Someone tries to spit on me on the subway - avoided with ease. Darby is looking at the New York Review of Books shelf in the gift shop. Is there anything you think David would like, I ask. Renaissance poetry, she suggests but she’s kind of half hearted with it. Nothing really speaking to me on the shelves. I’ll invent my own polemic. I just have to conjure some convictions, first.
After the exhibitions, which are a little bit of Rookie Mag and Things Culled From Tumblr and Darby is telling me about the theory of The Internet where it all originated from Tumblr - after the Whitney Claflin and James Turrell (my favorite James Turrell) and Sol Lewitt in the basement boiler room and Yto Barrado in the lawn - we take the train home. Lavender and vodka. I meet David at a strange hotel. Cop cars are swarming the building. I wonder if it’s because of the helicopter that went down, David says, but the helicopter was days ago and I am getting the creeps and, I want to go inside, I say.
My grandmother gave me some of her collection of Samuel Beckett books this weekend. In the books, all they do is wait and wait and wait. Missed happenstances. Restless. I’m not good at all this waiting. The books are in my bag and I fall asleep with a few back covers folded over on my lap. It’s a friend of a friend's hotel room. David’s been Co-Working. I’ve been sleeping. The windows are tall and glass and the room gets dark naturally. Fades with the sun. David doesn’t want renaissance poetry from Moma Ps1 for his birthday. David wants a mask of Bacchus like the one at my parents house and an 88 dollar overnight stay at the 88 Allen Street Hotel.
Monday, April 14
The issue is, I am so disconnected from nature here. The wilderness, yes, but my own sense of instinct too. Yeah, intellectualize it. Drag it out step by step by step and then there are logical conclusions I can live with. Though, if removed from cold hard fact I would know very little here at all. I know nothing viscerally here. Sometimes, elsewhere, I can know things intrinsically from the top of my head to the tip of my toes.
New York is good, though, and there is nowhere else for me, anyways.
I woke up this morning and my whole body popped. It’s hard to explain it. Like my muscles all revolted and then I couldn’t really move. It’s not the worst thing in the world except I know this would not have happened if I was somewhere else. I am rock solid certain that this would only have happened here.
So someone put a hex on me. And then I almost forgot that desperation reeks.
I spend all day acting boxy and square and off-putting in my many Academic Classes on account of not being able to really move. Every time I start to feel nauseous about the future considering this sort of bodily degradation beginning at Age Twenty Four Years Old, I try to remind myself that I have probably just been hexed. My friend in Witch School sends me some guides for lying down realignment. She calls me. You can join my cult, she says. Too many cults, and none of seem very all immersive. If I am going to do this, I would like to go all in.
David is back to coworking at his friends hotel and so I march my way through the Lower East Side for some company after school. One cannot wallow alone. They have a heating pad at the hotel. They have a Lush Ice Vape. David’s friend says that he’s been fasting and praying a lot. There’s a permanently skewed gold framed painting of a gold chalice of flowers and some thick tan curtains at the hotel. The curtains are pulled open so we can all see outside. David brought opera binoculars. I brought swedish candy. David goes to get some chinese food so I settle in to write, but he returns with his friend sooner than I would have liked.
“Bro,” David says, “I might go get the Penthouse Balcony King Suite Deluxe.”
“Hotel employees are better friends than 99% of people’s friends,” David’s friend says.
David does get the suite, and so we decamp upstairs. The curtains are more ornate in this room, and the aura is more creepy. Everything is funnier when you’re sober, David’s friend is saying. Something about coming face to face with your own absurdity. Something about how when you’re drunk, you think your’ madness makes sense. Two bathrooms and the shared patio and the love seat and the dog bed and David is saying that instead of dinner, instead of ever wasting money on a dumb dinner again, we should splurge on staycations instead. I brush my teeth with the hotel provided tooth brush and I sit on the floor of the erratically tiled shower. I don’t totally get the bit and I feel bad because it’s frivolous but, I do love hotels. Suspended circumstance The safest and most secure sleep. Float me out somewhere I’ve never been before. It’s good for girls with night terrors like me.
Tuesday, April 15
David stayed up all night making a borderline satanic short film. I think I’m manic, he says, which is probably why he got us the stay in the strange hotel in the first place. You’re not manic, I say. Not manic, like I need lithium, David says. Last night I was compulsively reading these decentralized networking protocol white papers, David says. David starts telling me about an opera he wants to see. Something about The Only Monotheistic Pharaoh.
I walk home and I stop at Whole Foods to buy some Clear Headed Kombucha and Chicken Sausage and Cymbiotika Vitamin C. I feel really terrible. I make a list of affirming statements. I FEEL AMAZING. I HAVE NEVER FELT BETTER.
I take a nap. Wakeup and, David and his friend are on the phone downstairs talking about a startup. Eavesdropping and, it sounds like they’re about to independently invent the concept of the Male Influencer. “Imagine believing yourself to be cunning and self-serving, and you're doing so by working for [redacted],” David is saying. “Anyone can learn to code,” David is saying. Tune out, tune in, and now they’re inventing the Vending Machine. They’re talking about Jon Raffman and Petra Cortright. They’re talking about LA. Evil Women. Tax Day.
“Girls already invented being an influencer eons ago,” I tell David, when he gets off the phone.
David pauses for a moment. “I think girls and guys invented being influencers at about the same time.”
Friday, April 18
I haven't been able to fill in the blanks of the past few days. Becoming: utterly consumed. It was deeply unpleasant, honestly. I feel bad for me on Monday, thinking it would be easy to wrap up this thing I was working on and then almost losing my whole head instead. I stayed up all week. All through the very peaks of the night and then past that, even. At first it was all disjointed, but now it is making more sense. And the good news is, good for art and life - I can intuit things again!
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
Monday, April 21
From 8pm - late at Night Club 101 — I will be reading in the Domino Reading Series, alongside Jess Wolfe, Dani Narins, Ruby Hoffman, Gordon Glasgow, Jade Wootton, and Matthew Gasda. Gallipony x Solar System DJ set after the reading.
Tuesday, April 22
From 7pm at EARTH — I’ll be at Gideon Jacob’s Earth Day (and final) performances of IMAGES: A Show. - “Join us for an evening with Father Bartholomew Mary, a Second Commandment fundamentalist who believes images are the problem. Father Mary is blind, Southern, and a minor character from a forthcoming novel by Gideon Jacobs.” | Tickets are required.
From 7pm at Fleiss-Vallois — Fleiss-Vallois and The Whitney Review presents “Experience of Vastness & The Rose” - “a reading and conversation with Ariana Reines, Alex Auder, Marissa Zappas, and Whitney Mallett on the polymathic legacies of Niki de Saint Phaile and Leonara Carrington.” | RSVP at fleiss-vallois@vidoun.com
From 8:30pm at The River — DAM at The River is an evening of performances, readings, and talent featuring Maya Ibbitsen, Sam Lathrop, Ewan Lloyd, Grant Payol, Alex Berns, Francine, Ada Wickens, and more.
Wednesday, April 23
From 8:00pm at Old Flings — Johnny Hollywood celebrates the launch of The Kubrack Manual - “Counterintelligence Interrogation. Experimental Novel, 50,000 words, original artwork.” Featuring readings from Sierra Armor, Cassidy Grady, Chloe Wheeler, Jonah Howell, Johnny Hollywood, and more. DJ sets by Hunter Biden, Coldsteel, Udntknowme.
Thursday, April 24
From 6pm at The Cactus Shop — Date Time returns to Brooklyn. Two rounds of speed dating. Fall in love. Leave the Internet behind.
From 7pm - 9pm at KGB — The Meg Spectre Spectacular is in The Red Room - “, A silly extravaganza of live comedy, cute outfits, silly songs, and cheeky cocktails” “Andy-Kaufman-meets-Weird-AI.” Meg will be joined by Alex Arthur, Molly Vivent, Karli Marulli, and Whitley Watson.
From 10pm at Paul’s Baby Grand — Julia Cooke is hosting Art Party.
clever funny fabulous