January

“unfixity is the hygiene of the world”

It snowed yesterday for my birthday. I had a perfect time seeing Narcissister: Voyage into Infinity in the middle of the afternoon and got a burger after at Corner Bistro. My favorite burger in New York City. So many birthdays in Capricorn season. So many Capricorns. This city flatters discipline.

I did two readings this week. A salon at SVA’s Design Research, Writing, and Criticism MA program.

& Riley Mac and Montana Thomas’s “Straight Girls,” a monthly at KGB. The lineup always leans heavy on poets, which I like. Poets rarely read too long. I tried something new and gossip-y (names changed) unsure if the gossip would lose all stakes without its context, hoping there was something there regardless, in the petty bitchiness and faux moral outrage. It killed :)

Coming up Saturday, I’m part of this night of manifestos. Six hours of manifestos. It’s semi-private but if you want the info and have my email, write me. I don’t know yet what I’m going to read, but I have been rabbit-holing Futurist manifestos and wondering if the indeterminacy du jour (and really, du jour since… post-structuralism?) forecloses (calls to) action.

I saw two group shows this week: Give Me Two (which just opened) at Anton Kern and False Icons (at the end of its run) at Salma Sarriedine. I recommend both as solid surveys of (mostly) emerging NYC artists. Not surprisingly, their press releases articulate frameworks of fluidity, adjacency, and contingency—art world de rigueur, and which I wouldn’t otherwise bring up except they’re evidence of what I was talking about before, thinking through how we’re into deconstruction more than rallying cries of united movements. It makes me wonder if anyone’s manifesto will be like “unfixity is the hygiene of the world.” I’m kidding?

Not related: I was online too much today and stumbled across industry plant allegations entering the writer substack chat re: Madeline Cash. Without exhausting a full recap, it felt a bit Marjorie Taylor Greene-style QAnon-fueled careerism trickling down to literary fiction. The democratization of media epistemology in an ecosystem where (ostensibly) exposing an insidious cabal rewards engagement, and stretching the truth has few consequences. Civil war is breaking out in Minneapolis and a Substack power user is worried a novel was reviewed by four “important” legacy media publications (incredibly, he counts The Atlantic “important”).

Meanwhile in New York, the seat of the nation’s media consortium, guests at the apartment helped themselves to a generous heap of ketamine, slicing it with a “Zohran Mamdani” plastic cutter.