The perks of being wallpaper

“Where can I get the salmon sperm?”

I am trying to relax. Really, it is trying. Effortful. Why let go when it is so comfortable to hold? I am shvitzing in my red Balenciaga bathing shorts (sample sale, $40) at Spa 88, as I wait for readings by Geoffrey Mak, Journey Streams, and Simon Wu, curated by Living Content and called… something I’m forgetting. Steam related? Or to do with water? or with the body? Idk.

I am trying to relax but instead I’m talking to G— about Han Kang and S— about monetary policy.

I have taken a Klonopin, not that that matters.

I am relaxing, lying in a belt-less bathrobe on a vinyl bed, drinking white wine from a plastic cup while Journey reads about a tongue on the perineum. While Geoff reads about Gothic architecture and Crystal Waters. While Simon reads about CrossFit and I evaluate my abs.

We smoke a pack of yellow American Spirits somebody left behind. I eat some borscht. We sip free shots of flavored vodka from the waiter who’s got a crush on one among us. I ask if somebody has ketamine but I’m told it got tossed out because it was problematically “angular.”

I don’t think I’ve done a powder since New Years Eve. I have exceeded my two-drink limit.

The night before: a book launch party for Caleb Femi I co-hosted as Document Journal; you can see some pics and read about it here.

Although arguably every event I go to has to do with my job(s), which is(/are) so abstract as to colonize my entire existence, this was plainly a Work Event so I had only two drinks.

A truism: If you can put people in a magazine somebody always wants you to put them in a magazine.

A tall cardigan-ed man with an abstractly threatening demeanor asked if I worked at Document, asked what I did there. I was in professional mode so I replied professionally. Then he pulled this woman toward me. A five-foot-tall Russian woman with inflated lips and stark collarbones. She whispered something three times, which I eventually figured out was her asking to speak to me alone. I was like, uh… sure… The man dissolved into the crowd with serpentine practice. The model raised her voice: “You will have meeting with me yes? Yes, you will. Say we will get coffee, okay? We can discuss my cover. Look at me. I have modeled for Vogue in Mexico, in Czechia. Yes, I am short. But what about body positivity? Body positivity is supposed to be about things you cannot change. You can change weight. Me, I am petite, I cannot change this. That is what body positivity was supposed to be about. When can we meet? When will we have coffee to talk about the cover? Is that your phone, give me your number!!!!!”

I did not give her my number.

I made an excuse to walk in circles around the bar.

I cornered myself, I didn’t bring a plus-one, I was trying to just be a human robot. (Femi: “you are not wallpaper.”) I left at 9 pm high on nicotine from a filterless cigarette after having made some new acquaintances.

My plus-threes described the Whitney’s Art Party we’d attended Tuesday as “bat mitzvah–like” in our post-mortem group chat. Per the BFA photos, the most famous attendee was Mischa Barton. Sequins everywhere. There were two extremely sexy bartenders, very tall, and I loved the Alvin Ailey show. I anticipated it being performance documentation, which usually doesn’t land in physical space. But it brought together videos of dancers, installed beautifully, archival materials and media, and a wide range of art that thematically or historically engaged with Ailey’s practice and milieu (tbh I was being so chatty I didn’t closely read any wall text).

I loved works by Jennifer Packer, Ellsworth Ausby, Sam Gilliam, Hale Aspacio, Woodruff, and many others. I liked the sense of histories the install created, or how it made one aware of the ways an exhibition shapes how one looks at histories. An expansive, inviting, and complexifying manner to think about how a museum can deal with performance and performance’s worlds.

Good hang, nice exhibition design, really moving and potent and rich overall. Or is everything more impressive when you’re drinking free champagne?

“I like the red curtains,” said an art critic of the Ailey show’s scenography. “Do you think they’re MAGA or Mao?” asked a poet. “Lynch,” I said—all the downtown restaurant private rooms (well, I can only speak for Bridges and Raf’s) have red curtains now too.

At Raf’s last week I went to a beneficent gallery dinner where a museum curator asked if I watched TV and when I said “not really,” she glitched and then just told me the synopsis of a TV show. She said she didn’t eat fish for environmental reasons but that she never takes the subway because she has a car (aren’t we all full of contradictions?). Another museum curator said he got salmon sperm injected into his face skin. His face skin looked really good, shiny and full like a Christmas ornament.

“Your face skin looks really good,” I said. “Where can I get the salmon sperm?”

“Korea.”

Fabulous wallpaper, three desserts, 10/10.

Friday I was supposed to go to a gay-guy birthday at Julius. At the thought of leaving my apartment a brutal gravity clamped me to my bed. I vanquished this forcefield eventually—not in time for the gay-guy birthday but in time to go see live music at Honey’s.

There was free jazz-cum-metal (modal and immersive and sharp) by Dissensus, my favs; some zoomer rappers who didn’t rap, just played beats that sounded like muffled Andy Stott; some shoegaze; Beneviolence, who played his bass with his back to the audience; African American Sound Recordings whom I like and listen to frequently at home but I felt for this set relied too much on duration as a way to carry the musical decisions.

I didn’t look at my phone, tried to stand in the sound, or at least let thoughts cascade freely.

Sometimes I sense my pursuing Aesthetic Experiences™ borders on the pathological. (What I mean by that phrase is a bit philosophically unstable, as I would say reading a book or watching a more rigorous movie are still aesthetic experiences even if you’re doing it at home, but I don’t think Instagram Reels or TV are, even though I realize this distinction is fallacious and incoherent. But also, I mean, I see physical art objects or live performance or live music how many times a week? Like I see more in a week than, say, my mom sees in a year? This feels like a possibly insane way to live. I love it.)

Smoked half of everyone else’s cigarettes. Learned about punk cinema from straight guys on cocaine. Swayed and nodded my head. Met some zoomers.

At the sound of the shoegaze band everyone in their 30s (including me) wanted to discuss the guitar-music shows they most remembered from ages 18 to 22. Beach House—twice, I said. Waxahatchee, and, randomly, The Pixies.

Nostalgic, mumbly blurs.

Everyone in their 40s was like, Ugh, shoegaze.

I remember listening to A.R. Kane and My Bloody Valentine, cutting lines—white or orange or brown depending on money and mood—and tunneling out of physicality and unforgivingly deeper into my mind, feeling sorry for myself for falling in love with straight boys, while wearing terrible Goodwill sweaters whose shapelessness somehow, I hoped, could evacuate me of gender. I recall a bedroom I layered with rugs to try to erase the suburban insistence of its low-pile carpet. I remember hanging plants that I had to throw out once they started dropping white worms. No curtains; the sun set into my windows.

(As if the world were just for me: just for my seeing it: the falsity of capture.)

These memories register to me not like one life or one moment but like one performance, and my life now feels like another. Not discontinuous, no, but I’ve shed my pretensions of certainty. I’m constantly hoping that enchantment will arrive: that the world will cease to feel like and maybe just be, will offer to me an experience during which language will die and the thoughts will quiet and the signs and symbols won’t not mean but won’t cohere, will be boundary-less.¹

Will be deadened by the boundaries of the written word.

Mai Ishizawa: “My fingers remained motionless on the keyboard, enraptured by the smooth feel of the letters on my skin. Only my fingertips retained any sense of reality—the rest of me felt as languid as if it had evaporated into the air.”

Sleep with no dreams till 10:45 am.

Jenna Bliss’s opening at Ulrik—flowers and pregnant bellies and 9/11 before-and-afters—then finished watching Ash Is Purest White, holding my chest when Qiao said she wasn’t left-handed (watch the film, it’s free on Tubi if you’re willing to suffer through occasional ads), then Monsieur, the bar that’s replaced Boiler Room. Monsieur—a gay name for a bar by a straight man, a straight man’s bar in what was once a gay bar, a bar with no red curtains but instead with piles of books, lamps, tchotchkes, photos, tapestries, baroque glass lamps, singerie, stained glass, massive medieval-style wood beams… that is, not Lynchian but Luhrmann-esque.

Literally.

It’s Baz Luhrmann’s bar.

Fabulous wallpaper. Terrible music. It was kinda like getting hammered in a camp version of the Met Cloisters. I had a lovely time.

Then, for some reason, I went to two half-over parties and by the time I got home I was writing things in my notebook like “What am I so uptight about?” and “I’m scared because there is no order” and “I couldn’t even kiss people’s cheeks goodbye properly”—up till 6 am scribbling.

Up at 10:45 am again and writing this nonsense. All my writer friends keep being like, “Is Substack just people’s diaries plus the same takes about social media or ‘being cool’ and a girl?” I guess in spooling out some semblance of my life I’m trying to find a new form, something fluid and capacious and vital, but it is possibly pathological that I journal AND have a column AND have a Substack AND then write essays for magazines AND…

I started reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “In Maine” and I’m sticking on the line “The steady beat of the local people’s days—puttering, dreaming, working.” Is puttering, dreaming, working, local to Maine alone, or does it follow that a person “local” to anywhere could be up to the same? I suppose the implied difference is the “steady beat.” In New England she witnesses a committed regularity ostensibly denied to those imbibing the chaos of this city, a place of endless pulse and flow, no beat, no gaps, just blurred, incessant noise. In Maine, “[p]eople speak of worrying about the trees.”

Ishizawa: “All the training we went through to enable us to hold several pictures in our mind’s eye at the same time becomes an obstacle when trying to see a person as they actually are.”

I’m only 41 pages into Ishizawa’s forthcoming novel, The Place of Shells, but I’m obsessed. The above quote is from an art historian friend of the protagonist as they speak about the difficulty of describing the face of their mutual friend, Nomiya, who’s just shown up to the narrator’s adopted hometown, despite having died in a tsunami nine years prior.

“I imagined that still today, those vestiges of lives that had been driven into great mounds of rubble—the vestiges that served to erase all names and all the meanings attaching to things, and the memories these evoked—lingered there at the back of his sight.”

1. From the roof of Honey’s a massive Glide ad was visible, plastered to the side of a concrete building overlooking Flushing Ave. I couldn’t read anything but the logo because I need stronger glasses, about which I am a bit in denial.

I’ve been reading Language City, by Ross Perlin, before I fall asleep. It historicizes the languages of New York City. (English only truly predominated as a first language for a brief moment at the turn of the 19th-century, he explains. Of course, prior to colonization, Munsee was the most widely spoken language, and even the “Dutch” colonists were from a variety of language communities (Walloon, Frisian, Flemish, in addition to Dutch). Dutch and Dutch creoles lasted well into the 19th-century, as did a variety of African languages, Caribbean creoles, Italian, French, Irish, varieties of German, and on.)

This is set up to to the present of linguistic diversity here (the most languages spoken in a single place on earth) and the radical approach to revitalizing and recording endangered languages that are spoken in the city.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes, it had a section I can’t seem to find about how Manhattan became absolutely covered in text, primarily English as part of an effort of Anglophones to stamp out the variety of tongues spoken, but anyway, what I was getting at, what I can’t find, is the idea that New York birthed the constant unrelenting text plastered on a city—beginning, sinisterly, as so begin many things in this nation, with posters seeking runaway slaves and indentured servants—and then leading to endless advertising, signage, so on. Writing became an inescapable part of the urban fabric.

So, the massive Glide ad…

I don’t remember what I was trying to say.

Although I couldn’t in fact read the copy of this tremendous, three story banner, I have been noticing copy has been getting lengthier. On the subway even incoherent ad text goes on for sentences. I feel a few years ago everything was three words. I’m not sure what’s up with this. In Sean Monahan’s essay on the “boom boom aesthetic” of our Trumpian moment, he shows some web3 sunscreen ads that reference the magazine pages of yore with their long explanations begging you to buy. Also it seems every brand is starting a literary journal (some of the longest copy I’ve read on the subway were excerpts from a dating app’s publication; even a big jewelry brand recently approached me to “curate” billboards with quotes from books; readings are cooler than gallery openings the Substack commentariat says).