Coffeecore: The Winter Garden

1.

Even you, my little flâneur, need to get out of the city sometimes, no matter how much you love it. Take the 憧れ line to northernmost end, and get off at the last stop. It is neither the country nor the city here,  but a kind of in-between-place where everything is shifting.  The old estate with the winter garden is going to seed on the edges, and there are certain places where the plants get the upper end in the sticky mid-summer, but it not a ruin yet.

You enter through the conservatory, where you can feel the water content in your veins and the ferns touch your legs ever so gently as you walk to the makeshift counter, and order from the small machine the colour of a particular variety of chalcedony. You ask for a doppio, for the doubled arches and the enfilade of doorways that ratatats its way into the heart of the house, where glancingly, you think you see something and then blink and don't. Desire is fickle that way.

I think I might be right about this

This morning, while eating pickles for breakfast and reading the pretty good New Yorker profile of Phoebe Bridgers, a subtweet came to me. It was like,

It doesn't really make sense because I think I was only talking about Harry Styles and Phoebe Bridgers, and given that Phoebe actually grew up in California I think it's probably fine for her to make an album about it. Maybe I was feeling a little hostile towards her because she said in the profile that she'd avoided Didion due to "mansplaining."

A Brief Selection from the Pandemic Brain Dictionary

The pandemic has mangled my ability to think. My brain’s mostly written off the idea of producing coherent strings of thought. It’s a buzz of half-formed fears and anxieties that can’t figure out how to voice themselves. Occasionally, though, single words will push themselves through the static, like little missives from one part of my brain to another that got shuffled down the wrong path. Here’s a short collection of the those words that I’ve found myself lingering on, either from nuances in their meaning that I’ve probably just imagined, or because they sound fun.

Coffeecore: Exercises In Style

1.

The true flâneur loves encyclopaedias-- for how could this not be so, when they traverse, in short strolls, the city of mind so conveniently and alphabetically?

Consider, for today's fodder, the following entry from Wikipedia on Queaneau's Exercices de Style:

'Exercises in Style' (French: 'Exercices de style'), written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus (now no. 84), witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat. The literary variations recall the famous 33rd chapter of the 1512 rhetorical guide by Desiderius Erasmus, 'Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style.'

Today, like Queneau, we will take a bus, but not the number 84 bus, for in the Coffeecore Extended Universe the numbering of buses is a very precise and delicate thing. This bus is the not the S-99 but the X-99, since it crosses universes, and is an express which only stops, naturellement, at coffee shops. The passenger finishes a morning doppio espresso in a travel cup, watches a woman with a beautifully knit sweater, and dismounts at the cafe. Later, the woman in the sweater walks into the cafe and sits at a table.

Jenn's Bean Diaries #6

We murdered the unborn baby can of black beans.
Here's everything I made in one week.

It’s Not a Trick, It’s an Illusion

In an ordinary week, I might pass the building-wrapped-in-a-sheet-that-looks-like-a-building here in Cambridge once or twice—a diversion in my normal bike commute, a whim to stave off boredom (how quaint!). 

It’s a disguise that does not hold up to much scrutiny. Maybe, perhaps, if you were just barely paying attention—driving past on your way down Main Street toward the Longfellow, headed into Boston—it would pass muster, registering as anonymous urban scenery. But otherwise, it’s a bit like covering a weeping zit with concealer and the hope that no one will notice. The bricks, for all their attempt at three-dimensionality, are shadowless and flat. There is a real light and some shoddy wooden stairs at the front, leading to an entirely fake, impassible door. The whole thing flutters in the breeze. 

Healthcare Heaven is Seattle Grace

I’ve become newly preoccupied by certain fantasies, a doable substitute for other people. A vision as I’m pouring water for tea: lying on the beach under white hot sun, a square of chocolate dissolving on my tongue. Crossing Dean onto Classon, a group lifts their arms to their eyes to block the light, then all lift their legs in arabesque. Walking around an empty grocery store, taking my time, piling bundles and bundles of dill into a small purse. These dreams come at random intervals in my full time quarantine job, which is watching all of Grey’s Anatomy.

Grey’s Anatomy, a show that is still on air, is also a daydream: a healthcare fantasia where insurance issues don't exist, or, if they do, they are worthy of a plot point on par with a brain aneurism. As a pandemic continues to expose the (already glaring) cruelty of our healthcare system, the more Grey's Anatomy's medical insurance plot contrivances feel like pure escapism. 

Girl with a pearl necklace

Johannes Vermeer, Woman With a Pearl Necklace, ca. 1662-1665, oil on canvas 

So far the highlight of my week has been jumping rope, just once, really well — two minutes at top speed without once catching myself flat-footed. I had claimed one corner of a deserted outdoor basketball court that in the midday sun looked like over-baked fondant and started jumping rope in a seething rage. Somehow, thrillingly, it worked, and much better than the different soundtracks, surfaces, and times of day I had previously tried in the hope of improvement. I couldn’t even see the plastic-coated red wire as it whipped through the air, just heard it whistling as it passed overhead.

I had spent the prior couple of days frustrated by texts of all sorts, and I had been pushed past frustration into anger that morning when a friend with benefits asked me, in the course of otherwise fun sexting, whether I would like to have lots of men come on my face. I like this friend, and trust him and know his tone and comment were meant in the specific context of our play. Had he asked me a few days earlier, I might have rolled my eyes rather than abruptly telling him that I wasn’t feeling it and going to jump rope in a rage.

Buddy the Ghost

I’ve been learning Buddy Holly songs on guitar in quarantine. Learning how to make my Fender twang, which doesn’t really fit the rest of the music equipment in my apartment, the wall of synthesizers and drum machines ready to obliterate the theoretical raves which cannot occur. I keep being invited to “perform” streamed music created live from computer code into VR venues that resemble cyberpunk yachts and recreated Berlin clubs in Minecraft. I do it. They can’t ever see the white guitar sitting next to me.

The fact that Buddy Holly died at age 22 means you can project anything onto him. You can call him a nerd or claim him as a proto-punk or a latent compositional genius who would have ended up making classical music or a country bumpkin that all the city folk wrongly absorbed. I’ve heard all these things. Been frustrated by the shallowness of the portrayals of him. The shitty broadway show. The unsatisfying movie. The annoying song about his death that I won’t even name because we don’t need to hear it again lest we have flashbacks to the cheesy choir teacher being obsessed with it.

I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive

Agnes Martin, Buds, ca. 1959, oil on canvas

I knew we lived over the tracks but I didn’t know how over the tracks we were until I crawled out onto the fire escape today, sneakers hanging over the Q train’s cross hatching.

I am reading an uncorrected proof of Lorrie Moore’s short stories, a 700+ page paperback the color of a taxi. It is difficult to read, I mean, it’s hard to hold up in bed at night. It doesn’t support its own weight (these are not the types of comments you can leave in a review but I am telling you anyway it is difficult.) The real book, of course, is a hardcover.

In Moore's story What You Want To Do Fine one character hides from a bee in a phone booth for twenty minutes only to be stung when he comes out. “It wasn’t true what they said about bees. They were not all that busy. They had time. They could wait.” I am suddenly very busy; I have all the time in the world to sting. A train whizzes by beneath my thighs, the steel roof as smooth as a dolphin with motion. Made by Kawasaki, like my uncle’s motorcycle.

I hold onto one bannister to stave off vertigo. (Sometimes I lean against a column underground, but only if I hear someone weaving down the platform.) My legs shake a little. Maybe with fear, maybe because my ass is too bony for the rusted slats of the balcony. Bone on bone. I lean back against the brick wall. It is warm from the sun. I stop vibrating.

Coffeecore: On The City

for r. a. p.

1.

I'm doing it just this once our of respect for the good coffee.

That was always a lie, my little flâneur. Just this once? How many times have you walked the streets of our handsome metropole, on the pretence of a latte? How many times have you traversed the never-insurmountably-wide avenues, on the summer nights pulsing with the afterglow of their own heat? The Coffeecore Extended Universe was always, by nature, an urbanism. It is made that way by your walking it. The city is always and never completely in its cups.

Look out your pleasingly round window. Watch your breath fog up the glass. Watch yourself being alone, frame the image in the mind, and file it away. It is time to go out and see the city your coffee made, and the transient beauty of just this cultivated loneliness.

Routine Maintenance

Done well, a concept album, or series of albums, are a type of art nothing else quite reaches. You can’t just read the lyrics; to get the narrative you have to listen. Concept albums, for me, are the perfect distillation of my desire to watch a story unfold. To introduce characters and a story in the restrained space of songs is a technical feat. A work of literature.

The first time I saw Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties live was at the Dome in Tufnell Park. Less than a year before, I’d seen pop punk band The Wonder Years play the same venue (and they’ve played much bigger). But this time when Dan Campbell came on stage — lead singer of both —it was as the awkward, nervous, fictional Aaron, not as the lead singer of the much-beloved Wonder Years.

oh fuck, it's [insert date/month/time/whatever] already

A window in my apartment is broken. The one at the foot of my bed, responsible for the harsh rays of 6 a.m. sunlight that lights my sleeping figure on fire, like a slow cooker. Speaking of slow cookers, I was supposed to pick one up for $15 in downtown Brooklyn, but I was lazy and lied to the nice seller that my nonexistent roommate didn't want to buy kitchenware in the midst of the pandemic. Oh yes, my window. It fully closes, but there's a gap on its right side where the stubborn frame refuses to fit its hinge. It's cold in this apartment, then it's hot, and then it's cold again.

Gigi Hadid Is Pregnant

Gigi Hadid is pregnant and I have gone around (figuratively, via text) and told everyone I know.

The news came at the same time that the group chat was discussing the recent One Direction fan fiction TikToks. It was fortuitous, a moment of good spirits. Texting all of my group chats was like the old days, when I had #content to share and news to spill and too many people to inform. I used to forget who knew what, so I would always preface "I'm not sure if I told you about this?" I guess I still do that, but in a smaller way, my rotation of daily phone calls folding in on themselves.

Maybe next year!

My mother's acquaintances are not keeping it a secret that they believe New York deserves to crumble from a plague—because of the dirty way we live and because we're all in debt and because we think we're better than everyone else even though we're dirty and in debt. Hard to agree, exactly, but I do think we're better than everyone else. 

I would say "just kidding," but I'm not!

I mean, in general. About me, specifically, I am kidding. I would be nothing without New York and I don't believe I am contributing to it in kind. I recently spent an entire day in bed watching Vince Vaughn movies and eating blood oranges my friend Julia mailed me from California the day before she lost her job. I joined a mutual aid Slack group and then asked 100 questions instead of reading the easy-to-find on-boarding documents. I took a free enneagram test that said I act altruistically so that other people will notice and say "you're a good person," but pretty much all I do is rewatch Vanderpump Rules. I'm also reading Dune because a boy asked me to. And who knows how long that will last—it's definitely easier to read a book when you already know who's going to play the main characters in the movie, but it also seems like it's going to be about religion.

The only thing I'm doing with what you could call intent and joy is listening to Meredith Rogers, of PilatesAnytime.Com, which I do almost every day. 

Fixing My Dishwasher, Signifying Nothing

Yesterday I tried to fix my dishwasher and it wasn’t a metaphor. It was just a dishwasher that no longer drained that I decided to fix myself, unable to handle waiting several days for building maintenance while the puddle of rancid water at the bottom of the machine just sat there in the heat wave, signifying absolutely nothing. 

The Apps Are Alright: ACNH Travel Guide

There's no reason why Animal Crossing: New Horizons had to be so delightful. Nintendo could've half-assed it or even one-quarter-assed it and they would've still printed money. Instead, like the premium console game designers they are, ACNH has a seemingly infinite amount of stuff to collect and build, each with its own lovely animation and backstory.

Likewise, the ACNH Travel Guide iPhone app – currently the first or second best-selling "Reference" app – is a beautifully-crafted thing, free of the usual subscriptions and shady in-app purchases associated with unofficial game guides.

Once, I lived in ignorance, chasing the shadows of worthless yellow butterflies. Now my eyes are open to the true form of this world, a world where the value of bugs is easily summoned and precisely quantified. Thanks to the ACNH Travel Guide, when I see a paper kite flutter across my screen, its real nature is revealed to me: a floating bag of 1000 bells.

Testimony of a Fruit Man

I left my job last week.

I was a deliveryman for the nation’s premier provider of cut fruit bouquets. You know the one. For the last few years, if you were in a specific part of upstate New York, you might have seen me delivering fruit bouquets to people’s homes, workplaces, weddings, schools—at all times of the year, for all kinds of occasions. And of course, recently, that meant delivering fruit bouquets during a pandemic.

If you’re like any of the sensible people I’ve mentioned this to, that might have made you pause. Maybe you’re wondering something like: didn’t New York close all non-essential businesses? How the hell are Consumable Presentations an essential service? You’d be right in asking, if you are. I was wondering the same thing when I was informed that we would, in fact, be staying open, only about twelve hours before the shelter-in-place order went into effect. I still have a hard time digesting it. The things I’d spent years delivering weren’t groceries. They weren’t meals. They were chocolate-covered, overpriced novelties, bought for the recipient’s sake less often than for the customer placing the delivery order, so they could feel content knowing they’d spent enough money to show they care.

But hell, you could eat them. Apparently, that’s essential enough.

Good morning freia

The first time my friend Josh texted me “Good morning freia,” I did not take it well. It was our first day working from home, and days before New York would issue the stay at home order. I was caught off guard by the earnest message, and was sure it was some kind of joke. I still don't quite know why, but he had earnestly sent me what would become the first of our now daily quarantine ritual - texting each other good morning. Josh is one of my best friends and we text all the time, but we’re almost always making jokes, talking shit, and messing around. I don’t think he’s ever sent me such a formal, bland message before.

The first text

Eventually, I set aside my confusion, deciding that this is just one of those weird parts about the new normal, and returned his Good Morning text. Instantly, we were sending each other good morning messages every day, first just texts, but quickly evolving into an increasingly elaborate back and forth of photos, GIFs, and memes. The formerly untouched “Digital Touch” feature became a fast favorite.

Jenn's Bean Diaries #5

A bean murder most foul. You, the internet, did this!

"crazy times"

when my dealer told me that he was still an hour out, i messaged back "that's okay! crazy times!!!" he also didn't have either of the strains i wanted. it was a friday and apparently very busy. i was using a new guy who did contactless delivery, recommended to me by a friend of my boyfriend who lost his job the very next day.

i have said "crazy times" a lot since the beginning of march. it has become my new default "don't worry about it" phrase. usually it accompanies "no problem," which felt sufficient pre-pandemic. coffee shop out of the drink you like? no problem! coffee shop out of the drink you like, and also the world is being ravaged by a deadly virus? no problem; crazy times!"

the phrase is a neat trick, making you feel like you've adapted to the crazy times when you haven't. it's soothing, in a way, to say, as if by saying it you're acknowledging all the pain and suffering that this pandemic has lead to. when i feel optimistic, saying "crazy times" feels like a gesture of solidarity. yes, the pandemic has touched me, too. ain't that crazy.

but "crazy times" is a lie you tell yourself. yeah it's crazy out there--it's been like that for a minute. the longer it goes on, the less it feels like crazy times, and the more it feels like just "times." a new age to adjust to, whether we like it or not.

Quarantine Cherry Blossoms

This collection of photos I took in the past month is courtesy of:

• Immersive image research conducted by yours truly in search of a reference image for a tattoo
• The need to collect photos so that I will *mayyyybe* learn to draw a semi-realistic flower
• Aimless strolls to stave off existential malaise
• A tribute to the extremely curated tumblrs of yore
• "Nature is healing"//"We are the virus"

Press "continue" to see more trees in bloom, ideally playing this track

Please Do Not Listen to Noted Film Actor Stanley Tucci’s Cocktail Advice

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A post shared by Stanley Tucci (@stanleytucci) on Apr 20, 2020 at 11:04am PDT

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
          —Edmund Burke (misattribution)

Yesterday, noted cookbook author Stanley Tucci posted a video of himself making a cocktail. The video quickly went viral, prompting a lot of punny headlines about “thirst.” Like most people on the internet, I think Stanley Tucci is hot, and I liked him in, I want to say, Burlesque? But the drink he summons forth in this video is an abomination. Let’s begin:

Signs & Portents: This ominous circle of sticks in the park

Kalorama Park, Washington, DC, April 19, 2020, approx. 1700 hours. The pine cone is standing upright, as if a sentinel for something. The sticks are layered on top of each other, forming a thicker circle. Who could have left this? What unspeakable acts were performed here? Maybe I should have broken the circle as I left...

I Am Once Again Asking You If I Can Be In Your Band

My Resume:

Back before my name was Kate and my whole idea of the world hung on the words of John Keats, I went to music school to become a composer. I used to play the violin passably for twenty years and after four I could play the viola about as good as John Cale but then my hands succumbed to a series of small accidents dating back to kindergarden and now I only sing. I sing the same songs at karaoke that I sang at middle school talent shows. I have a voice like Fiona Apple (topical) but I try for Beyonce. I have a handful of microphones and I once used them as metaphors for someone I loved.

I worked as a recording engineer for four years and then I worked at a speaker company, and then I went to graduate school to study how noise bounces off walls. I've spent my whole life learning how to listen even though I'm not very good at it when it comes to conversational subtext but when it comes to what's going on with the walls of the Berlin Phil I can't be beat. I used to have tons of cool music software such as Logic 9 and a bunch of mastering plug-ins that let you delete people tapping their foot in the concert hall from a recording on a MacBook Pro 13" (2012) that had an accident with a 40oz of High Life but then came back from the dead two years later and my dad had to take me to Radio Shack to buy a new charger for it because I gave my old one to my ex-boyfriend's roommate's ex-girlfriend who had a mental breakdown two days prior. The computer finally succumbed in 2017.

Responding Creatively to Fear

I have a friend, Alex, who's a neurologist in Oxford. Next week, he's being moved to the front lines of his hospital's intensive care unit. Alex scored the highest possible marks on a personality test measuring how laid back you are, so it didn't surprise me to receive this:

I finally watched Outbreak on Netflix. Have you guys seen it? It’s soooo on the money, really recommend. You can tell it’s fiction though because the doctors have awesome PPE.

Some people are puzzled or even horrified by the idea of watching movies or playing games about viral outbreaks in the midst of a pandemic, but that only demonstrates how much our thinking has been warped by the recent obsession with positive psychology. No doubt there are those who probably wouldn't respond well to watching Contagion right now, but there are plenty more who like to mentally prepare for disasters through fiction and games: Station Eleven is one of the most-requested books at my library right now.

So, despite how much they might genuinely reassure some people, you won't see Plague Inc. or Outbreak featured in Apple or Google's digital shopfronts. Editors instead are promoting the most soporific or distracting titles they can find. They've decided that being associated with coronavirus in any way is a bad look right now, like the advertisers that have blacklisted any virus-related content – a move that's costing British publishers £50 million.

The end result is a curious flattening of affect from companies that can't ignore "these times we're in" but also don't want to feel like they're scaring consumers off. Which is fine – except for the way it damages the wider cultural world.

Coffeecore: The Rainy Day

Grab a cup, and snuggle up ... 

...  because it's a rainy day in the Coffeecore Extended Universe. Think of an Impressionist's rainy day in 19th century Paris, but without the pungency of horse dung and deprivation. Okay fair, that wouldn't really be Paris, but keep the wide boulevards. And keep most urban Impressionism's persistent, drifting quality of light on every surface, glancing off the canvas. This, too, is essential for the sparkling countertops and empty windows of Coffeecore. The Coffeecore Extended Universe is loose about particulars, such as Paris or canvas, as #coffeecore is a sensibility and not a set of laws.

This umbrella is dropped for the sole purpose of the puddle accumulating in its forefront. It is always just about to overflow. You can see it glimmering on the neatly paved sidewalk outside the windows of the coffee shop. You hear the little bell ring on the door when you enter, and stamp off your rainy shoes on a generic mat that reads W E L C O M E, but means it. Look at the mass produced object in all its radiant uniqueness! Look, at what it has now become, purple and cupped liked an inverse nasturtium!

Glute Bridges, Alone

On TikTok there's a trend where young people celebrating their 21st birthday during quarantine recreate the experience of going to a bar for the first time while staying at home. Their mom or dad stands at the door of a garage or basement and asks to see their ID, before waving them inside where the lights are low and the music is loud, and another parent or sibling is playing the part of bartender.  

My husband and I have a running joke, similar to this. Since we aren't able to loiter at a cafe on a weekend afternoon like we used to, we try to approximate the experience at home by raising the blinds and lifting open the two narrow, north-facing windows of our apartment, and sitting on the floor while drinking our coffee. By sitting on the floor we're able to look up and see more of the sky, and once we've pushed the coffee table into the kitchen to make space, the living room feels completely changed. We call this "Cafe Floor." 

I'm Your College Roommate Now

Long(er) distance

We sleep with a FaceTime call open most nights. I can hear wave sounds from his noise machine where it rests on a shelf 400 miles away.

It’s been about a month since I last visited Montreal, which means I would usually be heading back. Over the years we’ve settled on a month as the best balance between longing and practicality — a month between visits, give or take a few days.

Anna Wintour's Zoom Look

This morning: Condé announces 20-percent pay cut for execs; AW wears track pants. pic.twitter.com/fSiGT4Mka6

— Emilia Petrarca (@EmiliaPetrarca) April 13, 2020

I am shaken. This is almost exactly what I've been wearing for four weeks, a sartorial choice based largely on not caring what I look like from the waist down, because no one is watching. I consider it reasonable, though very lazy.

But is it actually... fashion?

Alternatively, if Anna has given up, how can any of the rest of us be expected to manage?

Don't cook!

I'm learning so much. On Saturday night, Tamar hosted a Passover dinner on Google Hangouts and she read us a Wikipedia summary of the ten plagues, which I probably knew at one point because I was a major try-hard at Bible camp and in my confirmation classes, but some of them still surprised me. I really enjoy Bible talk. Saith the Lord! I like the parts of Christianity that overlap with Judaism best even though the Old Testament is confusing because a lot of it is lists of names, and everyone lived to be like 675 years old. The New Testament is a lot of stories getting repeated over and over with hardly any different takeaways, and I don't support it because the female characters are very one-dimensional. Kidding! Clearly it just pains me when my experiences diverge from Tamar's.

We've been exchanging things at the door of the apartment I still have keys to. On Saturday afternoon, I biked over and put a bag of flour, a Glossier pouch full of face masks, and a loaf of zucchini bread on the doormat. The zucchini bread was from a recipe in the official cookbook of the Methodist church I went to until high school, when there was a rift between the congregation and the new pastor, who toed the line from the bureaucracy above when it came to gay marriage and other things. My mother used to make zucchini bread a lot when it was our turn to bring snacks for after-service. And I used to be very comfortable in church—as in, I would go around in sock feet and I felt no shame about using the copy machine for anything I wanted. The cookbook was assembled in 2003, I think, so it has a lot of recipes in it from old women who were scary to me at the time and are now dead. Alberta Hatch's famous hot fudge!

Final Fantasy X Makes for a Great...Miniseries!

For the last year, I’ve been enjoying a particular type of binge-watch: the “movie” version of JRPG video games, which collect all cutscenes and full-motion videos to turn the clunky, getting rid of grinding-heavy and repetitive gameplay of those games into approximately 10 hours of mindless, but not STUPID entertainment. The gateway title was Kingdom Hearts, which--I became convinced after watching the ‘movie’ of all chapters--was some Myth-of-Er-like philosophical fable (it’s more than light! keyblade! friends!). I’ve been plowing through Square Enix and other titles ever since, without ever touching a controller.

You see, as much as I love video games as a visual-arts genre, I am terrible at them. My last attempt was with the Switch version of Dragon Quest XI last fall: after 4 hours of gameplay getting stuck at a level-8 boss, I threw the towel and texted the man I had started seeing “I keep grinding just to get one-shot.” He thought I was being sexual. I was just frustrated with my inept party a mute swordsman I named BABY and a blue-haired thief named Eric. To me, the strongest JRPG movie, so far, is Final Fantasy X.

Leave The Window Open

Rilke In Neon

Or, A Plague Thinkpiece In Forking Paths

From The Pavillion of The Limpid Solitude: Eight Permutations

Givenchy poster by Tigran Manukyan

1.

The Plague Thinkpiece is the iteration of the old form, the thinkpiece, which is an iterative itself of the essay, which is anew the essai in Anglophonic drag. Irony is dead. Only sincerity lives. Sincerity is the new irony. Thus, sincerity is dead. Only irony lives. Irony is dead.

The voice of your leader reminds you of bluebells/rasping gateposts/the whir of server cooling fans. It calms/enrages/dispirits/enlivens you. You leader is alive/dead/dying. You write Rilke, or maybe Hölderlin, or maybe even Goethe, in neon on the wall of your increasingly adolescent bedroom. In every universe the German Romantics make a new and errant/precise sense.

On my last first date

(Ron Hicks)

I wore a long-sleeved velvet dress, and he seemed lovely. I'd suggested a bar on 13th and 6th because it was next to my office, through the small door under a red awning, warm lights, new patatas bravas slid across the bar, no questions, a waiter who hates me and everyone. The person I met wore a gray sweater and we talked for almost four hours. I noticed his hands, very elegant, liked the way he spoke about his friends with care and admiration, the paintings he wanted to make when he could get the materials, something about stretching canvasses from scratch. We discovered we both used to go to the same bookstore/cafe, and talked about the owner's new baby and how happy we were about it. I kissed him at the bar. He told me he wanted to meet again, and I assumed we would.

I Miss Audiences Losing Their Shit

There's a series of tweets going around with the audience reaction during Avengers: Endgame, starting with Captain America picking up Thor's hammer:

Just stop what you’re doing and enjoy listening to the #AvengersEndgame opening night crowd react to Captain America wielding Thor's hammer.

CHILLS. pic.twitter.com/RM8fimepxe

— Scott Gustin (@ScottGustin) April 7, 2020

Of course, the audience loses its shit, not just with the hammer, but with the portals, the snap, and all the rest. It's glorious.

I miss these moments, but then I never really had them, not in the stereotypically-reserved (but it's true) UK. The closest I've been to an audience losing its shit over here is during the BAFTA premiere screening of La La Land, when everyone spontaneously applauded after the opening credits. Yup. Even during a packed opening night of Endgame, the most I got were a few quiet cheers and chuckles, worried about drawing too much attention to themselves.

Welcome to the Window Botanic Garden

The Window Botanic Garden was founded in 2020. Learn more about the Garden's history and see photos from its archives.

One hour of music that you won't have to think about

On Twitter yesterday, someone shared this Soundcloud mix of Japanese ambient music called "Music Interiors." The description says it all: "mostly emanating from the corporate infrastructure of the 1980s asset bubble. FM synthesis, prefab 'lifestyle' soundscapes and the illusion of nature in a hyper-urban environment." In other words, highly relevant to the post-industrial ruins we're living in, the facade of civilization.

What's nice about this mix is that it has the classic names — Hiroshi Yoshimura, Haruomi Hosono — but selections that are so minimal as to be almost non-existent, flowing into and out of each other without a gap. It's truly background music, nothing dissonant or hectic, just the lulling whine of smoothly operating elevators with no one in them.

Pantry organization tips from my mom

Like many immigrants, my mom never wastes anything. She will wash one Ziploc freezer bag over and over until the end of time. She will lightly wipe and reuse Saran wrap. She saves takeout containers so that she can pack my sister and I food to take on our flights after a visit home. She keeps Barilla sauce jars to make salted eggs. I have adopted her habit of automatically ripping napkins in half and saving the other half for later (hot take: most napkins are too big).

My mom is an ingenious organizer so one Mother's Day, I thought I'd get her every organizing freak's dream: a label maker. (I received one from my partner the year before for my birthday and I had never felt so seen.) But the next time I returned home, I opened our pantry to see that my mom hadn't labeled anything — with the label maker anyways. Instead, I saw more examples of my mom's organizational creativity, which I will now share here:

Don't have a label maker? Use scissors to cut the words from the packaging (ransom note-style) and tape them onto the container.

Quarantine Radish Watch

I planted radishes on March 17. Radishes like cold weather. They only take 24 days to grow. Maybe, I thought naively, they’d be ready by the time this whole quarantine thing was over.

Urban farming came to me reluctantly. I grew up across the street from a cornfield. There were 40 people in my high school graduating class and we could all differentiate types of manure by smell. For the uninitiated, chicken is the worst. When we’d take field trips to bustling metropolises like Columbus, Ohio, I’d fantasize about the anonymity of being in a crowd of busy-looking people, of working in a skyscraper. I liked the idea of a fast-paced life, far away from corn.

Stick to the feeling!

Hi! I've literally never blogged. Nice to meet you.

Since April 1st I've been in a group where we've been posting one song a day; I realized quickly that I've sure been doing a lot of thinking (read: anxiety spiraling) since I started self-isolating, but I've been resisting feeling anything about this crisis. At first what came out was a jumble of banjo notes that relied on old tropes that don't reflect the seismic everything shift we're going through. And worst of all it didn't feel honest.

The Avalanches

I bought my partner a Sonos speaker for her apartment, partly because it was on sale, partly because the disposable income I used to spend on drinks and dinner I’m now using to fill rooms with noise. She appreciated the gift, though it was really for me as much as her. I’ve been spending more time at hers, and selfishly, I think I wanted it to feel a little bit more like mine.

Our Sonos habits are a little different. She puts together playlists with a wide breadth of sounds: Lauryn Hill, Haruomi Hosono, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modern Lovers, always at least one Dixie Chicks song. Her playlists are a range of tones that live outside time and space, but feel cohesive and deliberate. I think we used to praise these things as “eclectic” before that word became horseshit. They’re good playlists, is what I’m trying to say.

tomorrow is my 30th birthday

I used to be little and now I am big

I am that most embarrassing of things: an adult who is obsessed with her birthday. I tend to throw 2-3 events to celebrate it every year — don't worry, I am not the type of monster who requires that her friends attend all of them, there is an etiquette to these things — in part because I love attention, in part because I dig bringing groups of people together, and in part because it's usually one of the first nice-ish days of spring and there's a sense of relief that we can all finally go out and Do Things.

Perils of the Overworld

Looking at Midgar from FFVII's overworld. So big!

I'm still getting used to the internet being good again. There are so many cool things happening now! The backdrop is grimmer than ever, of course, which should go without saying but I'll say it anyway.

This morning Kyle tweeted a link to Robin Sloan's latest project, which is a newsletter about a video game he's currently writing and programming, called Perils of the Overworld. Eventually we'll be able to play the game, but that's not what's so fascinating about the endeavor.

Consider the Arcologies

1.

In the computer game SimCity 2000, there are four pixelated structures that are the apex of the metropolis. They are called "arcologies". An arcology is a real architectural concept with its own long history, that his been described with respect to the game. It is a self-contained city-building of some 150,000 pixelated souls. I am, in this particular moment uninterested in the pre-history of the buildings, but rather taken with what it is like inside them, which you must make up yourself, as the game never shows you. So here, I am going to be an impossible flâneur. 

FICTION: "Nostalgia Is a Permanent Condition"

After the U.S. postal service collapsed, most fashion brands switched to paperless invitations. A number of startups appeared, claiming to give email the same weight as cardstock. An Italian brand that once sent my boss a box of marzipan fruit via courier sent a customized version of that animal game everyone played in quarantine. I bought a rod and fished in the digital ocean until I pulled up an oarfish. It spat out a coin with my name and the invitation details on it.

In the weeks leading up to New York Fashion Week, I watched a lot of Instagram stories posted from the waiting room of a trendy clinic that promised to get rid of fine lines around the eyes. Everything was about the eyes these days, although I still applied mint lip gloss when I wore a mask. A YouTuber I follow said it made her breath less stale, but I’ve never been able to smell my own breath. Anyway, it helped me forget about my breathing and focus more on the rest of my body. I felt like a colt, the way I instinctively spun away from people who got too close, suddenly unbalanced, even in flats.

Let It Grow

Look out the window, open a newspaper, read the room; now, gaze under your arms. Are you still diligently removing hair from one of the more sensitive places on your body? Is that really how you’re living? If so, why? It’s finally time, ladies, everyone, to quit it with the Venuses and the Schwicks, the wax strips, tweezers, lasers, depilatory ointments. It's time to say no to razor burn and folliculitis, to fattening the coffers of the 2.2 billion dollar global hair removal industry. It's time, I'm begging you, to stop shaving your pits.