Substrate

#nyc
Ada Limón — On making work that matters
Ada Limón — On making work that matters
Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I think it’s very much a poet’s novel, which means it’s basically—a woman stands out in a field thinking about other times she stood out in a field. And I think a lot of my energy when living in the city was going towards the performance of being human. That idea of “Hello! Look, I got dressed today. Ta-da!”
·thecreativeindependent.com·
Ada Limón — On making work that matters
Memory, Hope, and Loss
Memory, Hope, and Loss
I thought about all the ways in which I had lived in New York, and all the ways I will keep living in New York. ​ And then again fifteen years later, a similar feeling, but with a different person, and without the drinking, but still with that desire to never stop talking, even though the thing was being said, over and over and over again.
·e-flux.com·
Memory, Hope, and Loss
NY experts, what are some good public work spaces in Manhattan with WiFi where I can hunker down between meetings to jam this week? Between Midtown and Wall St?
NY experts, what are some good public work spaces in Manhattan with WiFi where I can hunker down between meetings to jam this week? Between Midtown and Wall St?
NY experts, what are some good public work spaces in Manhattan with WiFi where I can hunker down between meetings to jam this week? Between Midtown and Wall St?— Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) July 8, 2019
·twitter.com·
NY experts, what are some good public work spaces in Manhattan with WiFi where I can hunker down between meetings to jam this week? Between Midtown and Wall St?
New York is one of the best cities when things are going well in your life because everyone else has so much energy that you can thrive off them. But, when things aren’t going well, that same energy can make it feel like everyone has their shit togeth
New York is one of the best cities when things are going well in your life because everyone else has so much energy that you can thrive off them. But, when things aren’t going well, that same energy can make it feel like everyone has their shit togeth
New York is one of the best cities when things are going well in your life because everyone else has so much energy that you can thrive off them But when things aren’t going well, that same energy can make it feel like everyone has their shit together and you don’t Honestly it sort of feels like some sort of social darwinian experiment where only highly resilient people with fantastic stress management can survive for extended periods of time
·twitter.com·
New York is one of the best cities when things are going well in your life because everyone else has so much energy that you can thrive off them. But, when things aren’t going well, that same energy can make it feel like everyone has their shit togeth
Moving to New Orleans from New York City
Moving to New Orleans from New York City
There are good mornings, goodnights, how y’all doings, and head nods and smiles and eye contact. There are neighbors who walk out on their front porch to give treats to my dog. There is polite chit-chat even if we don’t know each other. There are waves from car windows. There is communication. ​ That is where my money went. To rent, and to these women. I relied on all of them to keep me feeling safe, attractive, and emotionally healthy. I believed I could not have survived without them. And possibly I was right. ​ I was putting Band-Aids on myself for years. To survive life. I occasionally described myself as “good at New York.” I was able to maintain a life there. But that’s just it. I was only maintaining. ​ But that is what I left behind when I left New York, more than anything else. Eighteen years of building friendships. Those people are irreplaceable in my heart. I was waiting for a friend to join me, but I was content on my own, too. ​ She yelled to me, “Neighbor, come get in the picture, come on now.” She insisted on it. I did not know how to say no to her, and I did not want to. And so, I rose and joined them.
·curbed.com·
Moving to New Orleans from New York City
Something Like a Scent
Something Like a Scent
Everyone was young, but they all looked old. Eyes wide open, wandering Manhattan it’s difficult not to ask: Is New York City falling apart? I suppose, technically, it is, perpetually, given the amount of scaffolding everywhere you look. Scaffolding as a permanent fixture of older buildings. ​ New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again. Maybe cities excel at this kind of erasure? When I walk cities I rarely feel that sense of past-people or rituals I feel in the mountains of Japan The old roads in Japan have their own tchotchekes, but for the most part contain something “like a scent,” which is, above all, fun, and is perhaps the thing most easily lost in the chaos and nowness, the inherent “nowhere,” of the big cities, and those dusty plains of the old west.
·craigmod.com·
Something Like a Scent
cold
cold
a nervous, obligated curiosity We had witnessed the end of its long southbound journey out of mundanity and darkness. It was one more of the small, strange, lit up events the city offers, the tree like a hallucination, devoured by the darkening avenues, brought in to offer a visible reason to exclaim about something, the city inventing something upon which to rejoice. The holidays feel overwhelmingly personal, but perhaps the best thing about them is that they are not personal at all. look to the unnamed days of January and February
·griefbacon.substack.com·
cold
Soft Places
Soft Places
The night of the election, at 3am, New York was the quietest I had ever heard it, absolutely silent, but it didn’t feel at all like being alone. The silence was stuffed to bursting with presence, built out of all the other people awake and not making noise, people standing in the nowhere of a moment further into the future than they thought they’d ever have to get, the sound of thousands of champagne corks stuffed firm in their bottles, un-propelled. Pulling yourself out of the maelstrom and observing, for once a spectator rather than an actor, briefly relieved of consequence, as though you could pass ghostlike through the mass and volume of bodies and no one would feel a thing. No one could embrace you and walls couldn’t hold you. A pet is the image of a more merciful world, a life made only of tenderness. I always tell him, because another one of the reasons to have a cat, to care for an animal, is to get to say things that sappy and awful, to be allowed to be un-nuanced and unsophisticated, to love in an absolutely uncritical and un-rigorous way.
·griefbacon.substack.com·
Soft Places
What Surprised Me About New York
What Surprised Me About New York
I did not realize the city was so large. Brooklyn alone is the size of seattle. I knew the boroughs were a thing, but I figured they were just big neighborhoods, not entities unto themselves. There was trash everywhere. like, everywhere. which is not to say it was dirty, but just that there were so many bags of trash. So many Canada Goose jackets. So many dogs. So many Canada Goose jackets on dogs. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was extremely lovely and kind. An order of magnitude more diversity than any city in which I’ve lived. The subway’s weird turnstile-claw-revolving-door things are dystopian. Park Ave. is breathtaking; so is East Village. You look into each little brownstone and a part of you wants to stay there forever. Everything is a little bit louder than it should be. I miss it already! I miss it so much.
·jmduke.com·
What Surprised Me About New York
independence
independence
“That was always my dream of this city, watching it from a fire escape, in it and not in it.” “To be loved, one must be self-sufficient, whole in oneself, needless. Neediness is something anyone can smell coming off of you like the stink of unwashed clothes; love is guaranteed only by not needing love, maybe by not even wanting it, by turning and walking fast in the other direction.” “New York, for all its well-worn jokes and pretensions, is much America as anywhere. The skyscrapers of the wealthy stand in for wide open fields. Here, if you can afford it, you can live in a rooted glass spaceship so far enough off the ground that you never have to notice that you owe anyone anything. You can float in an uncaring cloud city, with everything you need delivered to the door, a transactional life broken up into clean and independent pieces.” “The next day there was the same list of things that had to be done, small graces and details, mistakes and apologies, threads to tie to one another.“
·griefbacon.substack.com·
independence
Sunday
Sunday
“But in the end we did my actual favorite thing, which is staying in the city over a major holiday weekend. Staying here over Thanksgiving or Christmas is the closest you will ever get to seeing a private New York, a New York as a small town, the bare, dead, and wonderful skeleton that remains when scrubbed of both transplants and tourists, when divested of anyone with anywhere else to go.” “We filled our apartment with loud, bright, sincere, concerned people being loud and bright and sincere and concerned at one another.”
·griefbacon.substack.com·
Sunday