So if these magazines (in cinema) both claim they’re everything but a magazine and that rather they are all media and lived experience in space, screen, and time, or a family-slash-sex mansion, then what actually is a magazine and why should we care?

Neither cinematic example makes much of a case for magazine’s importance, or at least social value. In DWP2, an investigative journalist is consensually coopted into rescuing the public image of a flailing glossy that just boosted a fast-fashion slave-labor brand and is, thus, in hot water with its audience, and more importantly, with its largest advertiser, Dior. In Star 80, a film from an era when people actually read magazines, a centerfold dies, and violently.1

Anyway, I do care about magazines. I’ve somehow worked in them for at least a decade and I continue trying to do so despite the fact that every year it becomes both less exciting and less remunerative, with rates falling far faster than inflation rises, more power to advertisers (or to the mono-brands who fund magazines/digital pubs like Carhartt WIP, SSENSE [RIP], Real Life [RIP], Untapped, Gagosian Quarterly, Ursula, so on).

“We’re like a family” and a “million girls would kill for this job” are real phrases, more or less, I’ve heard from former employers who expected seventy hour weeks (on a pittance of a salary) and/or who are now being investigated by both state and federal authorities. And I’m one of the lucky ones! I’ve at least, occasionally, had a job!

Why do I do this to myself?

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Tuesday I go to celebrate the launch of issue eight of Just Smile, a magazine filled with hot men, with shoots in international locales, with a great arts and culture section edited by . The party, at Lucia Alimentari, features an open bar offering multiple types of spritzes. The restaurant has removed its tables to make room for guests, but the weather is fine and most people stand on the sidewalk.

“How’s Vogue?” I ask someone who, apparently, has just left their job at Vogue. I say hello to another person whom I know from working together at a magazine which is now bankrupt; since his departure, it appears, he has a new penchant for hats. I walk to buy coconut water with a friend who, herself, quit her magazine job this winter, too.

I’m not answering the question I posed with my headline, I realize. In some sense, the point of a magazine supported by advertisers or promising to tell you what’s hot or not is to make capitalism as beautiful as it can be. A totality of fragments, the commodity as an infinite mirror.

The point is also to bring together ideas and image into a thing—not to reify these concepts and creations but to communicate different facets of an unexpressed present, to convene some sort of environment of connections and expression, to reach toward a social world (a world made of publishing). To drive down, around, forward. To expose and to wonder.

Or, to return to cynicism, the point often is to gild a founder’s or EIC’s ego.

The answer—as to what’s the point of a magazine—is manifold; the answers are these and none of the above and I don’t know what to say other than media lately seems to be about the irrelevance of its medium: DWP2 being about downsizing and tech money, the preview for the new Toy Story before it being about iPads displacing analog toys, the new season of The Comeback (snoozefest) being about LLM-written television… Every screenwriter is narrativizing the beginning of their end, I guess. Every writer is… well the machines will consume this text too, I’m sure.

All over town ads for services that generate text to target AI, where people increasingly get their shopping advice, are plastered to buildings and billboards and subways. Are these the last advertisements for humans? At a meeting for one of my commercial jobs, it was mentioned (passive voice intentional) that a client was commissioning copy to target ChatGPT as the second-to-end-user, since people ask questions about how to design their rooms or whatever from the LLM. This is, I guess, in one way the new SEO, which reshaped “writing” in response to search algorithms. But when we just have machines composing text for machines to read it’s like… what’s the point?

What was the point ever? To generate more money for lesser things.

“So the already questionable satisfaction allegedly derived from the consumption of the whole is adulterated from the outset because the real consumer can only get his hands on a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven—fragments each of which naturally lacks any of the quality ascribed to the whole.” (Guy Debord)

Anyway, I’m far from the first person to note any of this, but I can’t say that its non-novelty is, for me, any less dispiriting. Non-novelty being the rule of the day—recomposing things you’ve read and seen before. The death of what author, the authors who live forever, Frankenstein assemblages, the machine.

Well.

I liked this substack by sex work after capitalism by and this one on AI conservatives and the boogeyman of “French theory” by , this article on on the Philly police surveilling peopme’s anti–data center views in The Intercept, and this piece on the impact of logistics and trucking from warehouses and e-comm.

Toodle-oo.

These weird walls visually rhymed with the most oddly cladded building I saw on Warren Street in Tribeca, an under-construction condo (I think?) with these tiny slate tiles jittering against one another to an effect a tad more Rainforest Café than 270 Park’s.

Call it finance kitsch. Call it an insistence that last hope for human intervention has passed. Call it a trick. Call it spectacle which “proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance” as architecture, turned media, turned to stone, Medusa’s victim, all the better to lord over the public-private space on Madison Ave whose outdoor Bertoia chairs require constant surveillance and whose plan is so uninviting as to demand the largest placard I’ve ever read insisting, all too firmly, all too firmly as to seem coerced, that this “plaza” in the shadow of this monolith-monument to banking is “open to the public.”

Normally I have limited issue with simulation, although I can take issue with historicism except I do like it, when well-executed, in US churches: I prefer when they appeal to a medieval authority so I don’t have to pretend they’re part of the present as I do when I go to, for example, the Catholic church in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, whose painted drywall I find déclassé. I know this is politically insolvent—and there are places where this appeal to an uninterrupted, perpetually recuperated present-past fails, like at the Vatican, tackiest place on earth—but what I am trying to say is that while the stones on those two façades, most likely made of stone, were deployed in such a way that they looked like they must be anything but their materiality—that in trying to not be cut to square perfection and instead simulating something like a found object in place of a transformed material input they looked far more artificial than any patently synthetic creation—the 1903 landmarked Gothic revival St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side at least had the taste level, so-called, to make me, well, not believe in god, but believe I was in a building that was for believing in god. What could be more imminently unreal—inspiring to faith—than to hang six iron censers from chains in front of another, identical, made in, possibly, silver?

Don’t worry, I have not been transformed or transfigured into the faithful. No, I was there, sitting on a pew, for secular music, believe it or not. A performance by ARTEK of Monteverdi’s first book of madrigals, originally published (dropped?) in 1587.

These polyphonic Renaissance compositions for voice and harp (or at least a harp was used in this performance) largely describe love and death, as well as nymphs (Monteverdi was nineteen when he wrote them). Variously hypnotic, punchy, literal, or abstract were the five compositions, which had introductions between them by a professor, I forget her name, who, 86 years old, we looked it up, had an accent I have only heard in movies from like 1940–70.

What a strange way I structured that sentence but I’m not sure I am motivated to change it.

Anyway, the last of these compositions comprised three parts, with lyrics from a poem by Giovanni Battista Guarini about the fire of rage supplanting love (“you are not worthy of love by such a faithful lover. Ah, you will boast of my pain no more…”), then a poem responding to this poem by Torquato Tasso, basically being like, you “false and insolent” loser, your anger matters even less to me than your love, which probably was as empty as your anger since I guess, if you’re my foe, you weren’t my lover at all, followed by Guarini’s rebuttal…

Okay, the lecturer with the cinematic voice was like, these poets were responding, theoretically, to their discordant POVs on the nature of love, but, um, it sounds a bit more personal than that? Maybe I just see faggotry everywhere (wishful thinking) but “if your shallow mind cares little for my love and even less for my disdain, then anger and love alike will render vain the boastful sound of your mad speech” sounds more like a text from an ex than a proto-baroque Twitter opp.

More importantly, maybe Tasso was hot?

Like, would.

Guarini doesn’t really do it for me, at least in contemporary depictions. Also he seems like an asshole, too. Apparently while Tasso was incarcerated during what was probably a bipolar episode, people took away his work, didn’t give him the profits, and edited it without his consent—Guarini included.

What can I say, I have a type: tall, dark, and manic.

Subscribe to read my smut and my screed on homo mediocrity below. Also: political economy, reading and listening recommendations.

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But one tidbit from Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, Laleh Khalili’s recent book which traverses topics from oil drilling to container ships to corporatized military special-ops in order to attend to how capitalists make and unmake the world, its workers, and its materials. Really liked the section on sand.

The book’s within one of my favorite nonfiction subgenres, those about industrial standards, opaque financial systems, seafaring, and infrastructure—in which I’d include Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (still amazing), Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World (good journalism, messy theory) and Laura Trethewey’s The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World’s Oceans (fun info, off-putting prose). Maybe Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek could fit in here too? Or Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War? Freeports and all. Some day I will set my mind to getting to The Bottom of insurance, and also mining. Basically if you can present me a materialist analysis of an undersea cable,1 an ISO standard, an SEZ, or Diego Garcia I’m all ears.2

Speaking of “my ears,” got the rush lotto tix to see La Traviata at the Met. So fun but why do the costumers for the Met and the ballet insist on saturating everything to a cartoonish extent? Anyway, the acting and staging was a bit off but the sets were incredible and the music, obviously, pleasant. I feel like in everything I read about this opera—which, you know, is about a famous courtesan sick with TB, hooker with a heart of gold type stuff—people act like this is some universal human story but the middle is so attenuated and stiff and the moralism so rampant… anyway Lisette Oropesa’s stringy hair (wig?) looked FABULOUS when she was consumptive, sweaty, about to die. The prosecco went straight to my head, and the eavesdropping during the pauses was exceptional.

People are always saying the craziest shit in New York City. Or probably anywhere. I happen to live in New York City, where, come summer, everyone talks about “Europe.”

“Europe is so chic, my life was so chic when I lived there.” What was chic about it? “That it was so chic.”

Says the Pilates instructor.

“Ugh! Don’t let me die in San Francisco. If I die in San Francisco, bring my body—immediately!—to New York. Or Europe. Actually, I want to die in Europe,” says the opera goer in a similar (though less breathy) homosexual vocal fry as the Pilates instructor.

“Okay Bella Hadid,” says the medical assistant as she reads my weight on the digital scale. “So petite. So chic.”

“She wants to be a writer who is an acupuncturist. Or an acupuncturist who is a writer,” says a man dating a woman, who is thus vocal-fry-free. “Anyway, I’m glad I’m not the only one who will be making money. We’re moving to L.A.”

Ah, Dimes! I love you! I do! (Didn’t love the caesar salad, but I was Trying Something Else Out.)

Europe is so chic, if you ignore, you know, most of Europe, to say nothing of Europeans.3 One chic continental character though might be the fictional Kaspar Joachim Utz, subject though not protagonist of Utz a 1988 book by Bruce Chatwin, who, I think, is known foremost as a “travel writer.” Utz is about this kooky Meissen porcelain collector who lives in socialist Prague and fucks a lot of opera singers. I hate writing plot summaries so too bad for you I’m not gonna bother, the book is like 150 pages just read it.

Utz also combines several of my intersecting favorite subgeneres, including but not limited to: books where Some Guy is imagining what’s going on with Some Other Guy (à la Bernhard, Zweig), or chatting with Some Other Guy (à la Uhart), essayistic semi-fiction (Sebald, Cole, Lerner, Ishizawa, et al), Catalogues of Lots of Objects (Huysmans, eg). It’s nice to read a book that’s an exercise in concept, and that is also funny—especially the dialogue:

“Really?” I said. “How’s that.”

“Really, you don’t know it?”

“Really not.”

“So I will explain.”

Actually, maybe it’s hard to extract the dialogue from context. It’s about rhythm, really.

Utz also might fit the above-mentioned nonfiction subgenres: Utz keeps some porcelains at UBS, and, once a year, manipulates his way to the spas at Vichy—returning to Iron Curtain–era Prague every time much to the bewilderment of people who are like, You’re an aristocrat-adjacent obsessive collector of fine porcelain, maybe, like, live in exile?

“It depressed him, on crossing the Czech frontier, to see the lines of barbed wire and sentry-boxes. But he noted, with a certain relief, that there were no more advertising billboards.”

Finished reading Utz quickly. Really needed to work so instead cleaned the apartment and got in a YouTube fugue, obviously. After the new-age ASMR (too personal, won’t share), I got into my usual topics (transit, extraction—no Chinese bridges though, one of my favorite YouTube subgeneres).

Thank god they’ll finally figure out what to do with a flooded mine pit that’s been egregiously polluted since 1982 since there’s a way to profit off it now… 4

Speaking of China and infrastructure (as I was, I think, briefly, parenthetically, above), was interested by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations analysis saying that the US/Israeli–Iran war is reveling the US’s strategy of “low-cost” hegemony. Per Sinica, “Washington no longer sustains a full global order, but tries to preserve primacy through selected trade corridors and financial nodes.”

Race to the bottom even on trying to violently manage trade pinch points while spending exorbitantly on one-time-use things that explode, how all-American is that?

Idk what more to say, but this low-cost hegemony also seems quite expensive—pushing $30 billion on this war last I checked.

Scam nation.

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G— and I journeyed to PS1 to see Greater New York (I went to the opening, but didn’t wear glasses, so my takeaway then was “it’s colorful and I am not in the mood to chat”). I have an aversion to writing reviews/evaluations of large multi-person surveys, biennials, so on—thus am definitely not gonna do it on here for free, or practically free (thank you to my paying subscribers!) but anyway the third floor is the best floor, start there.

Tacos. A downpour.

Boarded the train sopping.

Back to LIC Wednesday for the openings at SculptureCenter. So many objects, and even more people, and I can’t take it all in, although I do like Magdalena Petroni’s use of metallic blurple.

Ellen Pau’s installation in the brick-lined basement smells amazing. Apparently, it’s the scent of tear gas minus the part that causes tears. I’d say top notes of cedar and incense with an undertone of something creamy, almost vanilla. Dyptique could never.

Outside, in the courtyard, where the bar has run out of everything but Acqua Panna, people are discussing disaster.

“He was really into 9/11,” says a painter of a Venice paramour, “and I’m really into 9/11.” Still, the relationship lasted only three days.

I’ve taken too many beta blockers and am experiencing no social anxiety and thus no stakes. I will not go to the afterparty. I am someone else entirely, someone fresh, flushed, without a hangover.

Do go to the party for Allie Rowbottom’s Lovers XXX on Thursday, a book which A— took my galley of so I have not read beyond chapter four. The party’s at The Box, from which, I previously noted, I am, technically, banned. (Having a lot of fun with commas today I guess.)5

The emcee, the publisher of a handsomely funded literary journal, was wearing some fire-engine red blazer that I think was meant to be smoking-jacket-esque, but which this gay guy in the audience, who may or may not freelance for said rich guy, described as “pajamas.”

“You’re about to see something that’s never been done, not once, before,” the pajama-ed gentleman announced. This “something” was Rowbottom reading from her own dress, which was made of pages from her book. She looked fabulous, but trust me I’ve gone to enough performance art in my life to see people read from their own clothes and/or rip apart their own garments before.

The reading is brief.

In a booth, this painter I know introduces me to someone I’ve met before, saying, “This is [redacted], she’s a socialite.”

“Hi,” I say.

“Is it okay to introduce someone as a socialite?” the painter asks.

“It’s a bit antiquated,” says the socialite, before explaining how she uses her powers for good—to “dom” “all the billionaires” she “grew up around” into being “patrons of the arts.”

“Is that who’s at the bottle service table tonight?” I ask.

No, the bottle service has been democratized, I am told, before being offered a book-branded vibrator on a keychain.

The vibrator is pink and white and not rechargeable.

Laleh Khalili, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (Verso, 2026)

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014)

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World (Riverhead, 2024)

Laura Trethewey The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World’s Oceans (Harper, 2023)

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016)

Hito Steyerl Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (Verso, 2017)

Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata at The Metropolitan Opera

Bruce Chatwin, Utz (1988)

Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (through August 17)

Ellen Pau: She Moves, SculptureCenter (through August 16)

In Practice: Magdalena Petroni, SculptureCenter (through July 6)

Allie Rowbottom, Lovers XXX (Soho, 2026)

Ugh!

In his diary, Hervé Guibert wrote, “Reaching the limit, on my return from an assignment, and by the sole fact of writing, at which I would no longer be a journalist, at which I would show myself to be inconsequential, unpublishable, at which I would detach myself, by myself, and as though without effort, without conflict, without a letter of resignation, and ever more, from this type of writing.”

Everyone at that dinner table—I love them all—has written and published/is publishing proper books and here I am, filing my little articles, feeling as silly as possible, plagiarizing myself, I think.

I think I might be depressed. But “Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside” Bernadette Mayer wrote so I guess The Only Way Out Is Through.

Renee Gladman’s book Calamities is another of these non-diary books that is sorta like a diary. Really, it may be an essay or may be fiction or may be neither. It comprises a series of short texts, each starting “I began the day…”

Early in Calamities, the narrator considers composing a lecture about “The Ongoing Story” but thinks to do so she must incorporate essays on her life. So, in quotes within this miniature essay, she begins another essay which also begins “I began the day” and asks a “question of narrative”: “was anybody still interested in it, and, if so, why?”

That sentence—that question—takes her eight days to write. “This sometimes happened when you were writing about narrative inside of narrative.”

(To spend eight days working word by word… one becomes aware of time, of the light, of the being-body—the body-time—eating or starving, pissing and shitting, sleep, sleeplessness, the ways life is there in the sentence, and outside it.)

“I hadn’t wanted to think about narrative at the same time that I was conscious of my body lying in the object world…. Was it possible to say that something was gathering outside of a thing with the intention of meeting something else when something else was the larger space in which that first thing existed? Could I talk about narrative as I was operating within it? I closed the quotes enclosing the text for my talk and took a train to New York.”

A stranger comes to town, a person goes on a journey—those are the two stories, right? So says the cliché. But here I am the city that’s meant to solve one’s problems, per Gladman’s narrator, and, since it is home, it’s the place where my problems most comfortably lives.

In The Agony of Eros, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes eros and depression as opposites. Depression is a narcissistic malady; in contemporary society, Han thinks, we have sex objects but not others—those who are necessary for eroticism. Life’s converted into a self-begetting illusion of pure positivism. Nothing is enlivened by its opposite; no drama can occur. The cultural logic of neoliberalism interpolates “love.” But, says Han, love can’t be positivized. Eros arises in front of the countenance which at once reveals and conceals, as opposed to in front of the face which can’t but be visible (and, he says, “pornographic”).

Something is alive only to the extent which it contains a contradiction in itself, he argues, perhaps rephrasing Hegel? Or, as Anne Carson writes on Sappho, “To perceive this eros can split the mind in two.” And, later, “Eros moves or creeps upon its victim from somewhere outside her.”

“I closed the inner essay to look at the outer. I wanted to find a word or sentence that could prove there was an even larger essay that was further outside of this one,” Gladman’s narrator writes. “I closed the quotes of lying in the bed with my eyes closed, and opened my eyes, looking literally into the face of the question of narrative, which was the emptiness of my apartment and the long stretch of that day that lay ahead.”

Closed and open. Inner text and outer text. Eye and I. The body in the bed. The face of the question. The countenance against the face. The erotic not the pornographic—the unavailable. The contradiction. The drama! Rejection, or the risk of it.

Before the section above I’ve described from Calamities, the narrator attempts to compile a list of every problem “large and small” she has addressed in her writing career. Not “asinine problems of writer’s block or other equally frustrating problems of self-worth (feeling too much or not enough),” but instead the questions that catalyzed writing. As she attempts to write this list, she’s overwhelmed by sexual feelings. She tries to think her way out of this: “her mind was…fixed on academic matters,” she insists, not to mention she’s “a serious writer” for whom nothing in writing was “inherently sensual.” Whence this horniness? “So when out of nowhere I felt her pressing against my back I had to put my pen down.”

Ah, that other, who had known she’d come in? With her not even eight days could be enough, since she’s stopped the writing act. Or not. Not at all. In fact, she’s come to comprise the writing—she’s the subject we’re reading about, that interrupting, not-writable her.

But is she really the source?

“‘What are you doing?’ I asked an empty, flaming room.”

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Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1975–1991 (Nightboat; tr. Nathanaël, 2014)

Bernadette Mayer, A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions, 1992)

Renee Gladman, Calamities (Wave, 2016)

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros (The MIT Press; tr. Erik Butler, 2017)

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton UP, 1986)

I drank what may have been a vodka soda from a little plastic cup that reminded me of the ones they use to deliver pills in the hospital and watched 3D renders of fire sprinklers. I was extremely sweaty, smelling-up somebody else’s sleeveless Rick Owens top.

Anyway, as I do, on the advent of this new issue, I’ll share my review from issue six (last fall) and encourage you to purchase or subscribe; in issue seven, you can read my review of Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, among many, many other things by many, many amazing writers.

CHRIS KRAUS
THE FOUR SPENT THE DAY TOGETHER
Scribner, 2025

320 pages

In Chris Kraus’s fifth novel, everyone dreams. The mother of Catt Greene—the protagonist who shares a bibliography with real-life Kraus—dreams of a better life for her daughters. Paul Garcia, Catt’s formerly incarcerated, recovering addict husband, dreams of a future where he’s free from probation and helping people as a counselor. Catt mostly reports others’ dreams, or imagines them, including those of three Minnesota adolescents who murdered a 33-year-old they’d met that same day. The four, now dead or in prison, had aspirations too.

In The Four Spent the Day Together, many of these aspirations are dashed, circumscribed, or deferred by money and real estate. Others are enabled by it: Catt’s being a small-time landlord affords her the time to write, and the time to fixate on people lambasting her online and IRL for being a landlord.

Catt’s obsession with researching the Nagano Trail murder substitutes for what elsewhere in Kraus’s oeuvre might be art or philosophy, Dick Hebdige (I Love Dick) or Simone Weil (Aliens and Anorexia). Still, as with most of her writing, throughout The Four, the historic and the contemporary, the intimate and the systemic, are inextricable. Kraus recounts Eisenhower’s presidential victory, the detonation of the hydrogen bomb, the imprisonment of the Rosenbergs. Later, she analyzes Uber leading to cab-driver suicides and the massive expansion of surveillance. These macro observations suffuse serene moments like a rainbow on a honeymoon or watching herons and loons with a cup of coffee.

The Four’s prose merges “scene” and “summary” to traverse scales of time and concept. Acceleration and distension. Resistance to social media temporal obliteration. The precision of marking political flows obliterated by the unfixity of trauma and addiction’s manic looping: Catt can’t place the when of Paul’s tantrums amid other events, and her dreams, which are primarily the kind experienced at night, only appear relatively late—a sort of empathic, or co-dependant, displacement.

“She’d managed to escape her own past, why shouldn’t everyone?” Catt rhetorically asks. Together she and her ex-husband offer Paul a second chance. Catt has “endless compassion for Paul’s outsider status because, she felt, it mirrored her past.” As a kid she was hitchhiking, trying drugs, chainsmoking, skipping school. Catt was a burnout who didn’t burn out. But her financial and emotional support can’t beat back the systems and dispiritments overpowering Paul. For the meth-immersed Minnesota teens who end up killing someone, their fatalistic past and future seem even more determined, tragic. They are so young. They could hardly imagine an outside to their immiserated day-to-day.

These comparisons and contrasts echo subtly through the books’ tripartite structure. Their accumulation reveals that the so-called American Dream Catt and her parents achieved, like all dreams, was never real. The warped, cracked mirrors of these characters’ lives both obscure and reveal the fragments of a rent-reality where people are punished and evicted for being born into a system that saw them always as surplus. A shuttle between houselessness and jail. A constant poison drip of desperation from a government that charges people for their own monitoring. A rash of aspirations foreclosed.

In the book’s appendix, we read text messages between the kids who committed the murder on Nagano Trail and their friends and family. We see they are loved by their parents. We see too how the situation escalates into pointless, senseless violence—absurd in its nihilism. We fear the meaninglessness of lives, of living. The utter bleakness and resignation—the hopelessness—of the inescapable hinterland. Unlike the proper narrative parts of the book, the appendix operates without an aestheticized structure. Connecting the novel’s movements across eras, locations, and characters invites attention; assembling its parts gives the reader space to invest any conclusion with a sense of personal discovery. But the verdict of The Four Spent the Day Together is nothing other than an indictment of the violent stratification of the United States.

Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together (Scribner, 2025)

What’s crazy is is across the street and I am FaceTiming her not wearing headphones.

We’re going to ’s StarQuest at Roulette. A performance lecture about children’s competitive dance. AI generated videos of dancing girls. A bedazzled sweatsuit. It’s recent-retro AI where sometimes it still glitches. The videos become artifacts of their time, and Man’s happy for having made the work when the models were Like This she notes during the Q+A with a Whitney curator whose name I forget: the mishaps heightens the tensions around reality, performance, success. An “imposed pursuit of perfection,” as she puts it in an earlier essay, not unlike how quantification and evaluation works on social media.

Only TV I can watch rn is Real Housewives of Rhode Island and even then I was on episode like two of six until not watching TV became IMPORTANT so suddenly! I wanted to do it. Or maybe I’m just taking more antidepressants, meaning I’m better at staying put, better at staying in bed.

Vancouver today.

On the plane I began reading Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, an apocalyptic queercore novel about a writer named Michelle. “Michelle tended to never shut up and she wanted big drama in bed all the time, requiring her lover to be a roller coaster tsunami.” Ahem. She worries that her girlfriend, whom she’s pretty bad to, would rather “kick her out so she didn’t have to deal with talking to or fucking her.”

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•••

So starts Lucrecía Martel’s new film Nuestra Tierra, the Argentine director’s first non-fiction feature, which had a sneak-preview in advance of its wider US release on Saturday, May 25. I chose the third row. I thought the seats were perfect, but convinced I’ve never made the right decision in my life, I asked G— about forty-seven times if he wanted to move once he arrived, by which point the theater was all but filled.

The film. Back to the film. The film derives from fifteen years of research, interviews, and courtroom footage centering on the case of the 2009 murder of the Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar of the Chuschagasta community in northwest Argentina.

•••

•••

“So, allegedly, in a trial, what you do is search for the truth. Allegedly,” Martel tells Nick Pinkerton in an interview on Metrograph’s website. “But Argentinian history, this is something that was imposed upon us. So the search for truth can’t ever be an intelligent search. What cinema can do, though, is reveal how truth is fabricated. In this way, cinema is very powerful. Not just [because it can] tell a counternarrative, a narrative that is counter to the official history, but because it is able to reveal how truth is fabricated.”

The goal of the film is to show the how—to refuse the forced forgetting of settlement. “On an intellectual level,” she says, “people in Argentina know that the land originally belonged to Indigenous people.” But the state continues to deny this, to say: you do not know what you know. “Being Argentinian means to live in a constant state of madness.”

•••

The film traverses media—sound culled from eSIMs; footage of a trial in which documents pile and pile obscuring the faces of lawyers who drink water from wine glasses; family photos; drone shots.

Martel’s fiction films deformation story into a filmic spatiality, supplanting normative narrative shape with extended experiences and all-encompassing sound. Archival material makes different demands than getting to make shots up yourself. Thus the drone shots create a kind of aesthetic unity or patterning. They also become a kind of insistence on the work of film, of filmic unknowing. They are not meant to be substitutes for god or angels, Martel says during the Q+A at Film Forum. You hear their whir. A falcon thrashes one other the ground. They trace the land, they follow “characters.” They are, she says, about “curiosity and distance.”

•••

“Right now, the issue of land and private property is a worldwide issue—not only in countries that were formerly colonized. We are currently seeing many wars disputing territories. And by zooming in to one specific spot, it’s a reminder that this is a planet-wide problem. It doesn’t only happen in this place. This is why the film ends with one member of the community saying, ‘I believe that if [humans] found another planet in the universe, they would also tear it apart.’” (Martel)

•••

Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Free Fall” starts with the historical fixing of the horizon into a line and the invention of linear perspective. It then moves through that perspective’s modern… if not downfall… then diversification into the tumble we find ourselves in—a proliferation of viewpoints and fragmentations of time and space, including, in the very recent past-present, a hyper-abundance of views from above. She asks if there is, allegedly, no more “common ground,” what’s up with all these images of, uh, the ground? (Tldr, she uses Adorno to say, Well, maybe we don’t need the ground after all.)

•••

“Eyal Weizman analyzes verticality in political architecture, describing the spatial turn of sovereignty and surveillance in terms of a vertical 3D sovereignty. He argues that geopolitical power was once distributed on a planar map-like surface on which boundaries were drawn and defended. But at present, the distribution of power—he cites the Israeli occupation in Palestine as his example, but there could be many others—has increasingly come to occupy a vertical dimension. Vertical sovereignty splits space into stacked horizontal layers, separating not only airspace from ground, but also splitting ground from underground, and airspace into various layers. Different strata of community are divided from each other on a y-axis, multiplying sites of conflict and violence. As Achille Mbembe contends,

Occupation of the skies therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is done from the air. Various other technologies are mobilized to this effect: sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an Earth-observation satellite, techniques of ‘hologrammatization.’”

(Steyerl)

•••

Peter Brock’s show Anthropic at anonymous on Baxter Street features four paintings in the basement level and a fifth by the ground-floor door which I only notice upon leaving. Four feature metal bands separating marled color fields of oil paint—three horizontally, a fourth vertically. The fifth, with no metal band, has the sense of an inverted iceberg—what’s above the deep blue so overwhelms what sinks beneath it.

These aluminum strips are horizon lines, of a kind, or lines of division—but dividing what? These aren’t landscapes; these are fields of paint and aquaresin expanding beyond even the edges of their aluminum backing. There’s a sort of absurd proposition here: the introduction of the mythic horizon to abstract painting. Or that’s not absurdity, that’s fact: the horizon was always an abstraction.

•••

Steyerl describes linear perspective as being based on negations (eg., negating the curvature of the earth to supplant it with “an abstract flat line upon which the points on any horizontal plane converge”). The release for Brock’s show uses the word “negotiation” for the horizon—through which the hopes and anxieties of the present moment are both projected and held in suspension.

•••

•••

“As you are falling, your sense of orientation may start to play additional tricks on you. The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries. Pilots have even reported that free fall can trigger a feeling of confusion between the self and the aircraft. While falling, people may sense themselves as being things, while things may sense that they are people. Traditional modes of seeing and feeling are shattered. Any sense of balance is disrupted. Perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise.” (Steyerl)

•••

Blue or red, orange or brown—Brok’s press release speaks of a “binary logic” and certainly the shows feature divisions, but in each subsection emerge masses, eddies, jitterings.

•••
Bear with me.

Although he rewrote history to claim he went straight to suprematism, Kazimir Malevich—famous for painting a black square, then, eventually, a white one—had an absurdist, antagonistic movement he’d conceived along the way, fevralism. He and other Moscow avant-gardists rejected “beauty” and “aestheticism.” Malevich wanted to paint “nouns.”

A cow on a violin painted on a piece of wood, eg.:

“He believed,” writes Aleksandra Shatskikh, “that recognizable figures and objects and their details frustrated the viewer with the mocking meaninglessness of their disposition.”

This mocking was a good thing.

•••

This nounness has me thinking of taxonomy, of tokens—the values transformer models (including most LLMs) list and weight and sequence to spit out their sentences. Nouning meaning till it ceases to mean, or to at least ceases to point back to a perceived world. Nouns without things.

•••

Malevich’s noun-ness would precede Kosuth and his ilk in the form of drawings like Village (1915), where in he wrote the word “village” in a box, then wrote some notes as to why he didn’t draw “juts of nature’s nooks”: people would get the details better if they weren’t there. The prompt was enough.

•••

I wish I could find it in my search history, but X suggested a post to me—giddy—sharing a website that is “like Palintir for your personal browser.” Basically, it was a visually noisy news aggregator, or something. Maybe there was a map? Anyway, the sheer number of sub-windows, I suppose, was meant to communicate that you’re all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, that it’s all a game—one in which you play demigod.

•••

“The idea of a calculable and predictable future shows a murderous side through an insurance that prevents economic loss by inspiring cold-blooded murder. Space dissolves into mayhem on the unstable and treacherous surface of an unpredictable sea,” writes Steyerl of Turner’s unstable horizon in The Slave Ship (1840).

•••

•••

“Between contemporary virtual space and Modernist space there lies an aporia formed by the auto-generative nature of the computer program and its real blindness to the viewer’s presence,” architectural historian Anthony Vidler wrote in 2001. “In this sense, the screen is not a picture, and certainly not a surrogate window, but rather an ambiguous and unfixed location for a subject.”

•••

Fevralism’s defamialiarizaiton of familiar objects in fact made it dependent upon them, argues Shahtskih. We’re def not at Black Square yet. But already, in a 1915 letter, “astonished,” Malevich felt something: “Planes reveal themselves.”

•••

“The vanishing point gives the observer a body and a position. But on the other hand, the spectator’s importance is also undermined by the assumption that vision follows scientific laws. While empowering the subject by placing it at the center of vision, linear perspective also undermines the viewer’s individuality by subjecting it to supposedly objective laws of representation,” writes Steyerl. Now that stable observer is gone.

•••

“I’m going to make an analogy here. You know when the police throw tear gas at demonstrators? I don’t think the point of the tear gas is for you to be teary-eyed and like, ‘Oh, now I’m going to leave the demonstration.’ What the tear gas does is it creates a cloud of gas. And then it’s easier to shoot at people because you can’t see them clearly. So, it’s evident that in order to exert violence upon some people, it’s a condition to not understand them. Not understanding people allows you to exert violence on them,” says Martel

•••

Can seeing itself become a smokescreen? The fake Palintir interface is all but illegible because the real one is made for “analysts” who are increasingly biological holdovers in a kill-chain comprising bureaucratic diktats. If linear perspective constituted a viewing subject, who is the subject of this endless information? It’s the de-subjectivized, the excess, the human no longer necessary to the world of the real perceivers, the machines.

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Also saw Ohneotrix Point Never, with Freeka Tet doing visuals, at Pioneer Works. We were quote-unquote VIP so we watched from the mezzanine above which made me feel more secure about my hairline. Weird to be at a DJ thing where nobody dances? I liked the music and the projections/screens were so, like, 2010s in a way that felt soothing although I was like, Does all VJing look like ketamine+molly or do I simply have hallucinations when I combine ketamine+molly born of my obsession with watching screensavers and motion graphics? WHAT COMES FIRST THE MATRIX OR THE REAL? By the real I mean the vision, of course.

After the ADULT ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN THE FORMER INDUSTRIAL BUILDING we had pasta in a WOOD-CEILINGED RESTAURANT WITH EDISON BULBS IN MILK JARS hanging from OLD WAGON AND/OR BICYCLE WHEELS. I kept telling G—, WOW WE REALLY WENT TO BROOKLYN and he was like, Would you move to Greenpoint? and I was like, NOT EVEN IF IT WERE FREE!

We were in Red Hook, btw, but geography is always a fantasy.

Back to Lincoln Center Saturday for a Balanchine matinee. I really like Stravinsky, okay? The Bizet (Symphony in C) was flouncy and organized, the Agon (Stravinsky #1) was a lot of folding, dividing, felt very, like, modernist. Firebird (Stravinsky 2) with the Chagall costumes made me realize just how theatrical the music is, also, so many colors! I was sort of cross-eyed because I’d only slept two hours but…

Even more than Stravinsky, I can’t shut up about Moby-Dick,1 so that same evening G— took me to see Moby Dick (no hyphen), an originally German production by Robert Wilson with music by Anna Calvi at BAM. (Back to Brooklyn, baby!)

The play(?) seemed like somebody’s idea of somebody’s idea of avant-garde theater. Like, if I wanted to write a parody of self-serious and nonsensical Art, I would come up with people speaking pointless lines somehow adapted from Melville in over-the-top voices while doing contrived hand motions and pausing and staging prat falls at random intervals in white face paint… although I don’t know if I would have thought to include corny indie rock that people danced around holding chairs to with such brave and surprising lyrics as “la la la la la la la la.” A lot of the audience was laughing. (There was also a laugh track, separately.) What was the joke? I felt it was on me. Incredibly boring! We left early to eat tacos… The tacos were a 4/5.

This is the basement of Gosh, a new venue on Mulberry street, whose soft-opening is populated by 70 percent straight men.

Gosh is three floors, each with a different style (I’d hesitate to call them themes). E.g., the ground floor features something like a dome which rises above a climbing wall whose plastic hand-holds have been replaced with possibly real quartzes. Deer-skin poufs are arrayed by it, since bodies too densely pack the space for anyone to sit.

Upstairs infinite curtains depict, only upon close inspection, clumsy medieval scenes, like some sort of Chaucerian Realtree. The staff wear Adidas track jackets, zipped to the top, in either black or red.

We sit on low leather banquettes—apparently inspired by Rick Owens’s furniture—in the basement’s back corner for much of the evening. We only stop talking about the bullet holes when we start talking about how sweet the drinks are. We only stop talking about the incoherent music when “Beauty and a Beat” comes on and we simply enjoy it.

What is the point of the feigned violence here? Thou doth protest too much, really, a bullet hole in every single pane? It would be all too slick if it were executed correctly. When we leave (the club closes at 2 am, as if we’re in any other city but our own), we discover the coat rack has collapsed—everyone must search through a pile on the rain-sodden carpet to find their jacket.

The ground floor of The Cock is 100 percent men and the violence is marginally less feigned: some people don’t care about what no means, but that’s always the vibe, isn’t it.

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“Did the journal factory explode” like why am I talking about Pepsi instead of the movie? Okay, one thing I’ve noticed about movies lately is the lighting. Not the fact that they are or aren’t lit properly, but that every depiction of bourgeois life (Sentimental Value, The Drama) preponderates with tasteful lamps that, to me at least—as, lol, a professional design writer and consultant to design brands—wind up being Really Visually Loud. Louis Poulsen. Artimide. Flos. A lot of Flos. Flos who recently gave me a free little light but(!) would only give me 30% off the ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR BULB I broke on another lamp… beggars, choosers… but regular readers KNOW how I feel about LIGHTING…

So goes without saying that my literal nightmare is a green-lit pod inside a clothing store where everyone is so high on weed they’ve given themselves the kind of autism which I take personally, yet here I am at the Telfar 420 celebration.

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In the magazine’s April 20 issue, David Sedaris has an article about how he is secretly (was secretly, I guess) gay married. “I just shudder when I hear a man say the words ‘my husband.’ Something about it sets off alarm bells in me.” Literally same except now I’m married and obsessed with saying “my husband.” (I am the only gay guy allowed to feel this way except for my husband.)

Until I got married, not only did I not believe in marriage, I was actively opposed to it. I came of age when gay marriage was an uncertain horizon into which—it seemed to me—some among the older generations of queers had sunk a lot of time and resources. They were vying for normalcy, not for liberation. I saw coupling, generally, as a trap. My first writing mentor, Bruce Benderson, quite literally wrote the book against marriage, Against Marriage. I was with him.

So what changed? I suppose I did. Obviously marriage needs no defending. Half the men in this country are trying to enslave their wives in the name of Jesus. But I think spontaneity and risk need affirming—and I am just perverted enough that normalcy seemed this kind of risk: a way to rethink and rename what was permissible to myself. A way to be bared to another and thus to be altered.

Or maybe I’m just a bourgeois gay guy who wants to upgrade apartments in order to own even more lamps.

To be fair, also, I sort of eloped. I defend eloping. I defend SPONTANEITY. ***RoMaNcE.*** !!!PSYCHOSIS NOT NEUROSIS!!! I don’t know if I defend, like, having a wedding… Well, do whatever you want. I am trying to be less defensive. I love a party. I love filling out a form.

Of all The Articles I could be discoursing about this is the one I chose? It’s been World War Three for like at least half the time I’ve been alive and here I am navel gazing. Foucault: “Perhaps one day people will…not be able to understand how a civilization so intent on developing enormous instruments of production and destruction found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxiously concerning the actual state of sex.”

Hehe!

Bruce Benderson, Against Marriage (Semiotext(e), 2014)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (Vintage, 1990/1976; tr. Robert Hurley)

One notion of my project (initially I’d written “identity”) apart from this novel I’ve ben working on was to become the “Virginia Woolf of PR parties,” but I’ve had little material to work with as of late: the carpets are red as ever, threadbare after fifteen minutes of use. The passed plates are elevated children’s food. The step-and-repeats have been “democratized,” to borrow the observation from : one doesn’t wait for a BFA photographer, one produces one’s own imagery in front of the logo-smeared vinyl while wearing borrowed accessories.

Some banality is beyond the hope of literary rescue even by this latter day modernist. This corporate eyewear party is state fair–themed, randomly, and I stand on the elevated platform of the false carousel since I am 5'8″ (in scare quotes) and occasionally appreciate a view. I don’t see much but two women, content creators, encircling champagne flutes with the entirety of their lips, chugging. They are filmed by friends or employees under halos of handheld lights.

I see several homosexuals who I have been belatedly informed find me…

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•••

Before I left, my analyst made analogies to atomic structure as I lamented circling the void (we are discussing identity). He mistakingly put protons in the outer orbits, although I did not point this out because his will-to-knowledge is his favorite cudgel, and I like to let him have it. I tell myself this is generosity, but in fact it is fear of retribution. I do take everything personally, my self-hatred being bounded by nothing more than my self-regard.

•••

Refuse to make decisions regarding dinner except to say, “You could buy more lettuce, if you want.”

•••

Watched the Werner Herzog movie wherein all but one actor has been hypnotized and think, well what else is social life. I’m not feeling optimistic, I suppose.

•••

Are you feeling irritable? R— wants to know; this isn’t pointed, this is acknowledgement, a kind of care, and the question is rhetorical insofar that you wouldn’t ask it unless the answer were “yes.” If you seek a problem, you will find it, which is one way to make meaning, as I told my analyst, but that doesn’t make that meaning true.

•••

Truth, ach! I know little of that, but I can offer a truism: benzodiazepines don’t count when you take them on a plane.

•••

“Escapism,” writes Adam Phillips, “is another word for adaptation, another word for life itself.”

•••

The more I think I am supposed to do something the less I want to do it. What I mean is that if sex and drugs come easily, I don’t want them. I then feel guilty for this lack of desire—or, I mean, I feel guilty for leaving unfulfilled shoulds. By some accounts my morality might be “ass-backward,” but what is acculturation if not refusing your reality so fully you cease to know what could be real?

•••

E—’s opening Thursday in Mexico City. Where the Void Begins, the show is called. Ellipses ring the gallery’s walls, emanating from a big vinyl “sigh.” Exhaustion and continuity, the perpetuity that always ends. This show’s got espresso cups mounted on photos of non-visible light and screwed into the wall. I’ve been drinking so much coffee, possibly for no reason other than maintaining myths of control: I haven’t been sleepy in weeks since my Beautiful Princess II disorder has been activated.

In the gallery’s center are two spirals—polished conveyor belts—and a found modernist-ish “thinker” sculpture on a circular mirror. A sexy straight bartender offers me far too many mezcals. I walk in circles. “I’m pretty sure they’re replacing me with a robot at the CBD lube startup,” someone says. “Does CBD even do anything?” someone (me) asks, inadvertently ignoring this person’s career lament.

I go outside. There’s this manic Moldovan woman who I think is tap dancing but she’s just worn down her high heels to wooden stubs such that they clack clack clack.

These guys I sorta know are going to the afterparty for another exhibition. Call a car. The afterparty is all but over by the time we arrive, so we go to the afters for the afterparty.

I’d been in this building earlier this same day. A Catalan designer had invited me over. His massively testicled dog ran amok and this woman showed up with a baby. Everyone ignored me, including the baby and dog. I drank mineral water. Mirrored plastic covered the designers’ floor, on top of which were dozens of tiny chairs. The sun showered from the windows on three sides, turning the mirrored floor into a blinding lens. “I’m going to have to sublet the next two months,” the designer had said, explaining that he took away all the ceiling fans because he hated how they looked, but soon discovered that without them the apartment heated to unlivable temperatures in late spring.

I am similarly practical in my decor choices, which is to say not at all. I do sometimes have breakdowns regarding the number of lamps I have—everything is light, immaterial, but where is an actually comfortable seat? It’s all sculptural, steel and small, gorgeous to look at and terrible for your back.

•••

Eve Babitz: “Any time I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.”

•••

I don’t think putting some books on platforms around one (1) sculpture counts as a museum-caliber show but what do I know? There’s another exhibition at this museum, more ambitious I guess, but I can indulge only one (1) video piece: Children’s Games #19: Haram Football, which Francis Alÿs made in Mosul. Children play soccer with an imaginary ball when ISIS had outlawed the sport. I am struck by the scuff and scatter of the sound, which I realize is not cut even when the videos shift, or not always.

An aguachile of tuna and shrimp, go to see a two-person show of Fi Isidore and Martin Farnholc Halley at KurtKubin, a project space in the upper level of a building populated by AV-repair shops. Player-piano scores cascade from the walls and fold into doughy piles, glow with LEDs. Up close (remember, no glasses!) I discover acupuncture needles, coins, a shoe.

•••

This museum cafe’s soundtrack is just Shakira’s discography. A different gallery’s soundtrack comes courtesy of Marc Armitano Domingo, who plays a salterio, hypnotic eighteenth-century stringed instrument. The pink-walled restaurant soundtrack I would describe as obtuse noise triphop (I like it; I don’t love that they decided that potato chips were a fair substitute for arugula). The apartment party’s soundtrack goes from Spotify to DJ playing theme songs from various minor cartoons to these two people singing—quite well, actually.

The apartment party’s vibe is mildly deranged, or I mean the apartment itself is: three plastic Kool-Aid men are stacked like a pop-art Brancusi, with plants sprouting atop. Mirrored text in the kitchen reminds you not to eat (“NOTHING TASTES LIKE SKINNY FEELS”). The ceiling of the lofted second floor slants in a manner I’d describe as accidental.

The tiled balcony wall is dangerously low. There are no outdoor lights. A man I’ve never met comes up to me to tell me about a time he was on acid in Oaxaca and got bit by a great dane. Being as there are no lights, I cannot see his scar, so he takes my finger and presses it to his face. Someone else is staring at me. Never mind, it’s a mannequin in a chair. Red hats with white embroidery appear. They bear the names of various Mexico City art-world figures: artists, collectors, curators. Somebody puts Emilio Bianchic upon my head, but I’m not feeling the look. I plan to stay no later than 2 since I aim to hike tomorrow but since I’m operating without the need for sleep, this sort of self-control is really beside the point. I leave at 4:30.

Wake up at 9, rejuvenated. The Uber driver says that he won’t take us any further up the road to the national park because last time he got mugged, but, I mean, there are like a lot of families with babies and dogs… The hike is nice. Pine fragrance fluoresces under the patter of rain and along the path a cake company has sponsored signage with quotes about nature. I reach a former seventeenth century convent. It’s kept in an agreeable state of ruin. In one of its cavernous volumes I feel the closest thing I ever feel to religion, which is history—a kind of faith, and illusion.

Skip back down.

•••

Claudio Mansour’s show Pompas de jabón at Drama, a window-box gallery at the end of the first floor atrium of a mall that sells Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

Claudio’s placed a metal band, maybe six feet long and a foot tall, on the back wall. Magnets hold various photos he’s taken—of namesake soap bubbles, an eclipse, legs in the air—as well as archival images he’s printed on aluminum sometimes to the point of abstraction, found contact sheets, and collages. A kettlebell on a black metal podium and coin grip flooring enhance the spherical visual rhymes.

In addition to the the gallery and card-collector shops, this building’s got a cinema. The cinema’s signage is straight out of 1978 and so is this 40-foot-high projection of Italian heterosexual porn (double penetration). Something like, I don’t know, 100? men sit in crud-crusted upholstered seats or walk in rapid, searching circles. The second hottest person there beelines for me and we begin a collaborative cruise through the theater. I would describe the general vibe as “pre-consent” and I enjoy perhaps too much attention. Sometimes I like being a star.

•••

The air outside has cooled. I walk three miles to eat four tacos. My brother texts me. He tells me he has a new job, but that he’s signed an NDA so there’s not much he can say.

From what I glean: he and one other guy take turns doing various tasks to train a robot to replace the people who would otherwise do said tasks. Whoever is not currently miming for the bot stands by an emergency stop button, just in case (of what, he will not clarify).

Finding it hard to want to find employment myself when all jobs are just managing the bots that trick the other bots into telling people, searching with bots, what to buy, but maybe my psychiatrist can fix my career-anhedonia when I we speak next week.

Or maybe I can save $175 and continue being marginally employed by replacing my psychiatrist with a robot.

Just kidding!

Werner Herzog, Heart of Glass (1976)

Adam Phillips, The Life You Want (FSG, 2026)

Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company (NYRB, 2016 [1977])

•••

For what it’s worth, most magazines are non-existent. I mean closed down, or a scam. It does not surprise me that one of my former employers is being investigated for racketeering.

•••

The first fifteen minutes in the pit at Funny Bar horrify me, always. Around me are jammed pods of people—taller than I—most whom I know, none whom I am speaking to. I am awkward, it’s true. I go up to people; they are invariably interrupted mid-sentence and turn away. I interrupt B— midsentence to talk to N—. N— is by all accounts a successful novelist and copywriter, to say nothing of her popular Substack. She says, like me, her experience is branding jobs are tending toward ChatGPT; the difference in our career and micro-generational positions, however, has presented her one lucky break: there’s some woman who wants to pay her to use ChatGPT instead of continuing to do it herself. People need to have employees to feel powerful, she says, and she will not use AI.

•••

R— and I discuss the trajectory of language: he says in his PhD program everything is geometrized, all can be an angle. Ah, like back when everything was a “vector,” I say. I say I can’t escape the word “contradiction”—embracing them, running with them, reveling in them, even escaping them.

Porosity is out, we agree. But space is in: She’s had major success in the finance space. He’s moving beyond the tech space and into building womxn-first spaces for creatives as well as funding a second all women trip to space… They want us to think they’ve obliterated time, and the artists who misread the physicists keep insisting on extra dimensions, or something like that.

•••

Who are they? THEY are the all-caps biggest brother who will not let you fill in the blank as you wish.

•••

My spatial realization is not so fresh, my sense of time not so distinct: in a draft of an essay from December I find: “the annihilation of time by space”—a fragment of a Marx quote in two separate texts that R— and I have separately been assigned or assigned ourselves to read. So I’m only five months or 120 years behind.

•••

“Ostensibly I write novels and stories, yet I find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is astonishing. I want to ask: How might fiction be conceived of as a space within which we attend to the world? A way of opening spaces—rooms—in which the world can occur? How might style foreground specific ways of looking?—by looking I mean seeing but I also mean a way of being in relation to the world, a politics of attention.” (Danielle Dutton, A Picture Held Us Captive)

•••

Sentimental Value is a movie that I put off watching because of the Helvetica Black on its poster but that is actually quite good. In it, a century-old Norwegian house is something like a character. In it, characters shade into one another, independence is impossible—I mean, they belong to a family.

•••

My mother visits; her first remark, as always, is “I don’t know how you live here.” Sometimes I don’t either. At eight each morning they commence construction in the apartment above and debris cascades through a hole that’s formed around the steam-heating pipe. My Manhattan one-bedroom is $2,000, and thus a “good deal.” People huddle around my front door, same as ever, to eat ice cream from the shop to the left or to wait for brunch at the restaurant on the right. R— screams—Aaaaah!—and finally they move so we can leave. I’ve started drinking again and every martini glass is oversized such that I am immediately drunk. I attempt to get the film from two disposables developed but the line to do so is a block long since I guess the local camera shop has become TikTok famous for its flattering passport photos. I take my mother to a number of restaurants, the spa, the Frick, and Broadway, in hopes “she will like New York a little bit more, since it’s the most important place to me.”

•••

O— visits; I read her book. In it two Canadian girls tumble through New York, stretching their money from odd jobs (selling dresses, modeling possibly in the nude); they stretch it, in part, by getting men to pay for them.

•••

N— says to read “The Profession that Does Not Exist,” a recent collection of seven essays in The Baffler about how people make money as writers (they don’t).

•••

O— is by all accounts a successful novelist, to say nothing of her popular Substack, where she recently shared a quote from Jamie Hood: “I don’t plan on reshaping how I write to abide by a tediously totalitarian publishing schedule; I suspect this would alienate any people who theoretically like what I do. Maybe I’m wrong. If you need to speak with the manager, she’s a real bitch, and I’m right here.”

•••

It’s true I’ve not written a newsletter in over a month, nor published any articles, although I hear some things I filed in September may finally come out this summer; with any luck, I’ll finally be paid for them, too.

Danielle Dutton, A Picture Held Us Captive (Image Text Ithaca)

Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour (Verso, 2021)

Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value (2025)

I am in the bath with my husband because I have just gotten married and this is my wedding. It’s maybe 3 am. We are in a charcoal-carpeted hotel suite on the sixteenth floor. “I spent seven hours driving around in a Sprinter van with him,” the peptidette continues. She’s talking about Clavicular. “I was just injecting him the whole time. I don’t know, I needed a job.”

I am superficially aware that countless articles have discussed this man, his presence at that fashion show, lookmaxxing, body fascism and fascism more generally.

I haven’t had time for the gym nor for discourse. I mean I have chosen to do other things with my time.

I’ve read only thirty pages, maybe, in the past week—rereading Harrow by Joy Williams. “After they released the ball they held the afterward of their poses for a vanity of time” is a sentence only she could write. (She is describing bowlers.)

In Harrow the world has “pretty much” ended; the teenage protagonist Khristen is at a former lakeside hotel that is possibly also a hospice and/or nursing home and/or training ground for terminally ill and/or geriatric and/or suiciding revolutionaries. At least in the chapter I’m at. The elderly await or activate the deaths of vivisectionists, animal experimenters, so on. There are also some more typical guests, whom the hotelier-cum-terrorist-leader Lola dismisses as delusional given the aforementioned-mentioned apocalypse. One guest is a ten-year-old would-be lawyer who speaks of legal fictions. “He did not wear glasses but if recalled by others he was a frail little boy in large smudged glasses” is how Williams describes that child.

Two pristine floor-to-ceiling panes frame the pines and, further, the Catskills, from this IRL honeymoon resort room. Or cabin. The room or cabin is a standalone prism so I keep calling it a pavilion. The room-cabin-pavilion features pamphlets describing both the local flora and the spa and restaurant’s modernist decor, which possibly results from a brand partnership with a high-end furniture retailer. The resort prefers not to replace the sheets daily due to washing and drying’s resource demands but its heated pool is always on. The pool overlooks the mountains through an open portal. At sunset the peaks haze Barbie pink. Once I could only see life as desktop images and thought this was a personal failing but now I can only see life as desktop images and realize that this isn’t seeing the world as other than it is, it is simply seeing it as I am, and, also, the always-on heated pool is fantastic.

Around Lola’s morbid property the wildlife has perished. Upstate I marvel at the hoof prints and little pellets of poop as I step with my inadequate shoes into others’ footsteps which have packed down the ice-crusted snow. Perhaps these are wetlands beneath me. It is warm today, over forty degrees. I haven’t seen the deer out our windows but my husband has. I have ordered raw venison as an appetizer. If the world has “pretty much” ended then I am enjoying a vanity of time.

“Being in the world is significantly different than thinking about the world, as writing is different than reading,” says Williams in a lecture on fiction and the world we’ve wrought. “Being is a spooky space, unfamiliar, momentously other.”

We turn off the lamps but white blazes in my right eye—a visitor or voyeur outside? (We do not close the curtains.) No, a migraine. It is painless and I do not see anything less than real.

Joy Williams, Harrow (Knopf, 2022)

On the subject of desire and decor (apropos my nightstand), I wrote about this guy who made a triangular bed, also. For PIN–UP. I do still write articles, although fewer lately, but I am trying to start again, because money may be a delusion but it is not a fantasy. I need some.

R— and I watched videos of each other from 2015 and ’16, since the meme the previous week had been to post said content. I found it difficult to look at myself. Was that myself? Clearly, and that is the problem—or opportunity.

Annie Ernaux, considering an old photograph: “Of all the ways in which self-knowledge may be fostered, perhaps one of the greatest is a person’s ability to discern how they view the past, at every time of life and every age.”

L— and I go to see Cure. Think a grittier David Lynch making Silence of the Lambs in Japan. Or, I guess, loosely, late Tarkovsky if late Tarkovsky decided to make a crime thriller/make sense. Basically, the film tells you everything that a normal detective movie would’ve hidden from the start, so it is no longer a detective movie. Instead it is a movie about transference/counter-transference. About identity and refusal. I liked how it looked.

I do the exercises I am told will free my spine from my consciousness, or that will bring a whole-body consciousness that will make me, anatomically, free. I skim Giovani’s Room, in which James Baldwin wrote, “People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.”

I suspect that one must self-deceive to live at all, or, I mean, that whatever truth one arrives to occludes yet another.

Half-recumbent on my analyst’s green leather couch I say I wish to view my selves—my ways of presenting them to the world in writing, being, so on—as not unlike how Italo Calvino describes Invisible Cities for which he “built up a many-faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions.” I imagine a series of prisms which refract one another. Transforming. Splintered light. Movement. The transformation of what is there, how that is shown and seen. But, in the end, the prisms insist on showing what exists, what is real—ever differently. Instead, I tell my analyst, I live my life like Wile E. Coyote. In place of revealing my identity I paint a trompe l’oeil tunnel onto a mountain—an utterly believably facsimile of the real—with which I hope to capture the Other, but the Other runs straight through the unreality I cannot control while I crash my skull against the stone.

He doesn’t have to point out that my whole analogy is, in some sense, spurious. Like everyone’s, my identity is always-already split, and my ego-mask is always doing the work of revealing that for me, just not to myself.

In the morning, as my coffee brews on the stove, I read aloud to myself the beginning of Mario Levrero’s novel about writing an impossible novel. He, or the narrator, wishes to capture “luminous” experiences, which are experiences that he necessarily can’t capture, so he spends all his time trying to get to the state to capture them (ie., he plays a gold video game and doesn’t write). Then, before bed, I read about Marco Rubio in an article which featured such galaxy-brained lib takes in defense of foreign aid such as “Tom Shannon, the former Under-Secretary, explained, ‘The battle for technological superiority and economic dominance is going to be built through the markets and the resources of the Global South. Why would you take the one instrument that you have that connects you to all the Global South countries—and not just to governments but to peoples and societies—and blow it up?’” I also read, per a former Rubio staffer, “Most senators don’t read.”

Upon waking I read about ICE abductees left for months without medical care. I listen to a podcast about psychoanalysis in groups, about the invention of personality, about belief. My psychoanalyst says something about energy and I call him superstitious; I read his reaction as defensive. I defend my point of view until he stops speaking. Am I an agent of change or merely being changed in obvious ways?

I stop writing this post. I wanted to write about my life and to write about the lives some version of a we, which is to say an I in its world, but my writing felt trite, or worse, self-involved—a failure and not in an interesting way. I can’t write about the disaster of The Now as Erneaux does in The Years, maybe, because she is writing history, not the present, or she’s writing a present that is constantly moving in a way that has already been historicized. I am living, we are living, among the continuous wreckage that is the unceasing emergence, the many presents mediated and felt at once, in conflict, exceeding describability. The news is unrelenting, and the streets too, our lives, and here I am, writing about my days, about film or art seen.

E— and I saw: swirly layered paintings at Silke Lindner (I guess I miss taking acid), paintings of cats and wall sculptures of like deconstructed cameras or something at Chapter, and the Tom Burr assemblages upstairs at Bortolami (totally giving gay guy). Have a non-alcoholic beer.

R— and I watched: Festen (a family disaster; I liked it!), then something else I forget… oh, Beau Travail; watched Chloe, an insane movie where Julianne Moore hires a sex worker played by Amanda Seyfried to entrap her husband, Liam Neeson. Basically it’s all shot in transparent buildings (Moore’s fertility office, Moore’s glass home, plate-glassed coffee shops across from Toronto strip malls). Not good but like also a hilarious way to spend ninety minutes. Watched Herzog’s documentary on Antarctica then a bunch of YouTube videos about convergent evolution. Watching Nymphomaniac volumes one and two did not provide me with a monologue to perform for my acting class. Nor did A Useful Ghost, a movie about possessed vacuum cleaners, love, and collective memory—fantastic movie, every shot a sculpture, go to IFC stat. Here is a way history occupies the present: as a haunting.

The ghosts occupy dreams, find love, help electroshock technicians erase political education that leads to rebellion—or help save it.

“Psychoanalysis is not in the business of moral enlightenment, at least not directly. Its knowledge is descriptive rather than prescriptive: about the way things are, rather than what they ought to be,” writes Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books. “For those who have read their Marx, this is already a step in the right direction—that is, in the direction of a theory capable of producing change.”

“It is easy to forget that all accounts of the goals of psychoanalysis are prescriptions presented as descriptions,” claims Adam Philips, also in the LRB.

What something claims to do, tries to do, and in fact can do are not coeval, is my takeaway.

I cancel analysis on Thursday. I have one glass of wine, which is the most I’ve allowed myself each week since I’ve said I stopped drinking, so long as it’s with, like, shellfish or something. I have fantasies or delusions of enjoyment or control.

“Now let’s sit here for a bit, and stop being sorry about the things we’ve done,” reads the epigraph to this Carl Phillips book I’ve been meaning to read forever. An epigraph by one Tarjei Vesaas, a dead Norwegian writer whom I’d never heard of.

I want to misread the quote as saying something to the effect that being sorry doesn’t get things done, but clearly guilt is doing something for me even if it’s not serving me nor the world I’m in.

But I am getting too personal.

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The good movies and books:

Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice (2025)

Chloé Zhao, Hamnet (2025)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure (1997)

Thomas Vinterberg, Festen (1998)

Claire Denis, Beau Travail (1999)

Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, A Useful Ghost (2025)

Annie Ernaux, The Years (2008/tr. 2017 by Alison L. Strayer)

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

Mario Levrero, La Novela Luminosa (2005)

Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows, to the North (2024)

I have lived and/or worked in Lower Manhattan, including at a magazine with offices next to Dimes, for going on ten years. Despite this, I have avoided, largely, I think, that Dimes Square. I do not like podcasts where people just vibe.

The reading (called Oomf: Boys’ Turn) featured nine male or male-adjacent writers; I requested to go third. It was at a gallery in a walkup on East Broadway. From the second floor landing I could smell sour cigarette smoke. Two more flights to go.

The gallery walls featured only sticky notes and paint-stained screws. First, someone read about alien pussy, then someone read about anal pus. I read about, if not collectivity, co-existence. (Cruising, group therapy, protest.)

Throughout each reading, men harassed the readers and each other, made fart noises with their mouths, yelled or at least talked. Someone said “faggot” (not me, surprisingly). Someone said “gay marriage is capitalist” (not me, surprisingly). Someone said, several times, “Fuck [a certain online magazine]!” Someone said, “Finally!” when the reader following me finished and I turned to the heckler—he had Weird Al hair and acetate glasses taped together on one side—and asked why he was here if he didn’t want to hear, you know, literature. “Because I’m friends with [the host],” he said. I asked if he thought harassing the performers whom the host had chosen made him a good friend. “I’m a dickhead,” he offered as explanation for his adolescent insecurity. Our conversation cycled through cynical tautologies till he put his hands on my shoulder and visions of violence flared in my mind and R— asked that I get his crutches so we could leave.

“That must’ve been disorienting after Straight Girls,” T— texted when I relayed the events of the night to her, and she reminded me that the “humiliation ritual” and not knowing how to act IRL so acting like an online troll was the “scene’s” whole thing.

Straight Girls was the reading I’d gone to Wednesday at KGB. Riley Mac and Montana James Thomas organize the series. I’d gone to see read. She discussed haircuts in one piece, then, in the next, the uses of gossip, how people wish to be seen in association with others. Scenes.

Sunday was W—’s birthday. We went to see Narcissister’s Voyage into Infinity at NYU Skirball, a “feminist response to Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s iconic video The Way Things Go.” We walked into a theater with a curtainless stage. On it: palettes and ladders and ropes and pulleys and… We walked into a Rube Goldberg machine, a theater of anticipation, an array of objects provisional both in nature (Home Depot buckets, 2-by-4s) and in space-time (pull that lever!).

She crawled out of a little raised hutch. So did she. And then she. The three silent performers—wearing frilly dresses and expressionless, doll-like masks—put the machine-sculpture-set to work. Then they worked instead—dancing with balloons, spinning tires, arranging buckets—is this work? No this is play. No this is play-acting. No this is work, the work of being on stage, I assume everyone’s getting paid… She and she and she became machine, became form, turned kinetic sculpture. She and she bound her body to the inversion table, she flew through the air on the swing, she shot pyrotechnics from her lower body.

Standing ovation.

Snow blurred Greenwich Village. We forget to wait for F—, who chased us down wearing a black balaclava over his face. I told B— about how I’d watched Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 the other night, and felt there was a kind of resonance between it and Voyage into Infinity: How gesture and task get crystalized into form. How bodies repeat, distinguish themselves, and merge. How, by focusing on movements or objects derived from labor or of ritual, those movements and objects can be defamiliarized into sculpture; the art reveals the aesthetic and gestural language comprising our realities. Background ceases. Björk and Barney mutilate themselves in swampy goo, annihilating any distinction between them in species or subjecthood or sex. Mucosal oblivion. True love. And what of the whale? Reduced to spine and also cubes.

Or perhaps there’s something else at play: B— said he went to an artist talk of Barney’s the other day and it struck him that the artist’s oeuvre was a series of high-budget Rube Goldberg concept-machines contrived as excuses for him to put things up his butt without it seeming gay.

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I was going to read something else, a remixed old essay, but T— talked me into going with my gut, then made me tea that smelled like dirt and wine. Anyway, this is the fragment of my novel about phantom islands that I performed:

When writing becomes a habit you live worrying about what you will write and you cease keeping up with yourself. I’ve not asked to see the cinders of my father. I have asked to not be left alone and been declined. I’ve banged on doors, and some have opened. Behind those that did, empty rooms. Is it useful for me to describe them—their scale, the color or texture of the walls, the floors, the character of their light—or better to let you imagine the emptiness most familiar to you? I am aware of the gaps. Space persists between what I wish to give away and what I wish to lose: Stones in the mouth, pebbled teeth the fruit of another’s glut. What rot. The body flays itself upon the shore. The ocean does not want us. The seafloor does not want us. The Island does not want to be. Is using intentional language for the inanimate post-humanist or the most humanist one can get? Admixtures of language not alchemy but decay, the beginning of ends: “Where were you when language was first used?” the artist asks in her 3D video on display in Switzerland; so stupid so many of us took so many flights to see this, see each other; we all live in New York, except for a few who live in Kuwait or L.A. or Berlin. The no fly zone as the last free space: that is(,) a lie. Trash does not go away, it just goes somewhere else. The septic tank of intellectualism, the library to what is not: The Island an ungloved fist in the mouth; The Island as everyone else, everyone wanted. Lying as a false bid for freedom. Morality as a self-serving gift. The Island as a hollow core. The hollow as the portal. The portal as the promise. The promise as a lie. Lying in bed and letting sweat slowly drip from his forehead onto your tongue. The swelling. The device in the hand. The prosthetic. The map as the truth, the map as the size of the world, the abstracted as the only real: the device in the hand. Devouring and divining as near misses. The apocalypse as a fetish for the lucky. By the lucky I mean the rich. Relatively. This being the trendiest option. There are better ways to go. Mars as a holiday from accountability. Money as an abstraction the size of the world. The map not as a guide but as a trick. The hand as a fool. The hand as four fingers then a fist squeezing inside a chemically relaxed ass and promising you a baby. Lying as a bid for a future. The egg laid in the shape of The Island. The shape only known from the map. The map as the truth. The return as the inevitable. The return as a myth of time as a line. The line curled into a noose. The melting.