the #noticer

can pointless knowledge rot the soul?

Sorry, have been gone for quite some time. I could say I’ve been busy, but I’m not quite sure that’s the case. I’ve stopped and started a lot of things that due to a lack of work ethic eventually lose their timeliness, so I drop them. Maybe I’ll come back around.

I think in order to continue, to keep on writing, I need to exorcise some thoughts. I’ve collected some of them below. I’m worried I’ve spent a lot of time thinking too hard about a lot of the wrong things. Maybe you can relate. Anyway:

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I have a buddy who lives off of the Bedford L in Williamsburg and is grateful for the amount of space it affords him relative to Manhattan.

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I have a buddy who takes his Hinge dates to the River because of its nice and moody interior, and has no idea that it was designed by Green River Projects, a major player in the Bode Cinematic Universe.

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I was walking down Allen Street with a friend, a fashionable girl with ribbons tied around her bag, when Sandy Liang walked past us. She had no idea who that was.

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My friend, a growth marketing analyst who lives in Flatiron, asks me if I know who the Dare is, he’s kind of like LCD Soundsystem. I refrain from telling him “more like STD Soundsystem am I right??”

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I wore my Salomons to work once and a co-worker suggested that we hit the trails sometime.

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Word on the street is that Lorin Stein was at the Paris Review holiday party, even after everything that happened. No one took pictures, and I wasn’t there, so I wouldn’t know.

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Sometimes I’ll look at what other people on the subway are reading. I’ve learned that Intermezzo is $29.95 and that girl in the smart red cardigan and loafers with matching red socks bought that shit the day it dropped with similar fervor to an older man lining up for a new G-Unit CD back in the day. If someone’s reading an obscure NYRB classic, I take note of them as a mental enemy to be bested in intellectual combat, holding out my copy of Sebald for everyone to see. Mating by Norman Rush? Stoner by John Williams? Confirmed NYT reader and Twitter deviant. And I hope the man in the Vejas sneakers reading the paperback edition of Trick Mirror, the one with the black cover, uncovers what he wants to learn about women by the end of it. 

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I’m sitting at a chef’s pop-up when it finally hits me why that face looks so familiar. They just swapped out rolled-up hundred dollar bills and saying retarded for a spatula and shouting “BEHIND”.

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My friend will have two kids, a wife, and die in a New Canaan mansion without ever visiting The Glass House.

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At Storm King, on mushrooms, I see in the distance by the mirror fence someone I matched with on Hinge, on a date with another man. I hope they’re well.

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When someone I don’t really know asks me what I’ve been listening to, I take a glance at their outfit so I know whether to say “Bladee” or “this weird schizophrenic Swedish rapper”. I’ve been proven wrong several times on this front.

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If you’re a baddie looking for music recs, I either tell you babyxsosa if you live in Bushwick, or list off old Waxahatchee albums if you live in Park Slope. 

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I beat one of the East Villains in a game of pool one night and never saw them at that bar ever again.

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I always see a line outside the Carhartt WIP store. Sometimes I want to take a knife and cut open every Bushwick boy’s hammer loop, because lord knows they won’t be needing that.

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I explained to my date that people think that the arson at Rash was a hate crime, but it was actually by someone who went to Brown and had interpersonal beef with someone who worked there. We never went on a second.

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I tweet about Succession but watch the League in secret.

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I’m tired of seeing Porches everywhere but I doubt he thinks about me at all.

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Every day I walk around my neighborhood and the Zionist restaurant that serves the whipped ricotta is always packed with people who posted that shitty AI graphic of All Eyes on Rafah.

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I bring my Eckhaus Latta jeans to the Chinese dry cleaner to get them taken in and they treat it like a pair of Wranglers. I like this.

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At the bar, surrounded by friends and empty bottles of Miller High Life, my buddy says this place is like an “un-grammable hang zone” — he swears he’s never heard of Blackbird Spyplane in his life and spills beer onto his Evan Kinori pants. 

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I met someone at a party, a filmmaker, who said we should get coffee and maybe even collaborate sometime. I looked at their Instagram and the first post was them performing their version of a Criterion Closet video at the pop-up van by Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival. 10k followers.

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They played Dean Blunt at the new Fujianese restaurant in Brooklyn that wants to put a spotlight on an underrecognized regional cuisine, and my friends couldn’t understand why I found that funny.

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I hide my disappointment when someone tells me they’re into experimental cinema like Bong Joon Ho, but I’ve never seen the films of Stan Brakhage in my life.

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She said that she loves going to Film Forum, so I asked her what she thinks of the Jacques Derrida banana bread. She leaves the conversation to grab another drink.

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I hold this belief that knowledge will provide the key to happiness, or at least set you free. But a lot of it feels quite pointless. I’ve never read Adorno but I know which Bookforum contributors are in an Adorno reading group together. In my notes app I have categorized wine bars based on “good for dates” and “good for your boys” and “good for storyposting on IG” but on the way there I look up the definition of skin contact for the Nth time so I don’t come off as a fool. I listen to someone compliment a man on his Siegelman Stable hat while I sip a Peroni in that summer’s hottest loafer, according to GQ’s sponsored content section. I stopped reading the Cut because I realized doing so will not find me the love of my life, and I also ran out of free articles for the month.

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This e-girl that shows up on my for you page on Twitter keeps posting passages from Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior that I didn’t find all that profound when I read it years ago.

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I drunkenly sang The Strokes at Winnie’s alongside a niche downtown podcaster, and the next night at dinner all my friends kept talking about how they “hate Dimes Square”. 

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In an Uber ride home one night, I looked out the window and saw a girl I met once at a pregame years ago when I was visiting a friend at Yale during undergrad. The whole night she was misquoting Fitzgerald and Kierkegaard. Last I checked she just completed her MFA at NYU, and had a piece out in Heavy Traffic Magazine.

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On a rooftop in the West Village, I listen to a guy explain how he was also in SAE, but at Davidson College, but swears the hazing was just as intense. On that same rooftop, a balding, five foot five version of Augustus Gloop packs two pouches of Zyn 6s and talks about how he was almost Psi U at Dartmouth. 

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This guy lives in Ridgewood and is always at Mansions telling girls he’s all about non-hierarchical relationships and exploring radical intersections of art and technology in his design work. When I mention to him that my boys who came up with him at Buckley and Hotchkiss said he drunk drove a Range Rover into a Panera Bread on the drive out to Amagansett he tells me to shut the fuck up you fucking punk bitch. 

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In my ratty gym clothes I walked past Emily Ratajkowski and I wished she had the opportunity to know the real me. In my best clothes I walked past Eric Andre, who was in his ratty gym clothes.

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He got himself a Nokia flip phone after reading about the Park Slope teens. She got herself a Sony Cybershot after reading that the kids were bringing them back. They are both 28 year old software engineers who have the whole ground floor of a Fort Greene townhouse, backyard included.

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Someone I went to college with who was never cool reposts the artwork of Chloe Wise on Instagram. She says we should get a drink at Clandestino sometime and I say what’s that? We are at a gallery opening on Orchard Street above Delancey. 

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Is there a point to knowing any of this when I move out to the suburbs? Will I be thinking about restaurant openings and pop-ups as I fill up my smoker with wood pellets? Maybe that’s all a fantasy, and I’ll be stuck here, trapped in hell, paying rent, listening to a Midwestern transplant who lives in Greenpoint tell me that L’Industrie has the best pizza in New York.

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The happiest guy I know just bought his first home in the outskirts of Chicago. He listens to Zach Bryan and tags along to Taylor Swift concerts with his fiancé. On Sundays, he has his boys over to watch the Bears, while using Streameast on his phone to watch his beloved Knicks (he grew up in Bronxville). He doesn’t know what a zine is, nor does he know the difference between Northern and Southern Italian cuisine. He yearns to go to Paris and has no idea that everyone’s in Marseille now. He votes Democrat, thinks Trump is lowkey funny, and lines up to take photos of Van Gogh’s Starry Night when he’s at the MoMA. He is possessed of a rich interiority and asks me questions far more thought-provoking than anyone in New York ever does. He tells me it’s really awesome that I’m trying to pursue a career in filmmaking with much more sincerity than any aspiring DJ in Brooklyn has ever told me. I told him I finished writing a feature-length script but have no idea how to get it made and he paid for the next three drinks out of excitement, telling me that’s a great start.

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Back in Brooklyn, I explain to someone how the movie I made is about reconnecting with someone you used to know so intimately and before I can finish they reply that they love mumblecore movies like Noah Baumbach’s. Did you do Barbenheimer?

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Someone tells me they like the cute little stripes on my Thom Browne dress shirt.

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