new york etc
05/12/2026
In the month and change since the last time I posted anything here I have written around 10,000 words, which means that “blogging” is helping with one of my goals (write a lot more) but not the other (let people read it). This week I went all over the east coast (Providence-> Marion -> Boston -> New York -> New Preston -> Providence) in six days. In this time I got some really good news about my mom (no new tumors!) and some less good news (blood not working) and we got in a big weird fight (she has a lot of fantasies about asserting control posthumously) and I got her into Oklou. Every paragraph I write seems to end with cancer no matter where it starts, which is not very surprising but seems pretty boring to read. I feel like my thoughts are a rock rolling downhill. I kind of thought that my mom and I were going to have some years to become estranged and then un-estranged and now it feels like the rest of our relationship has to be compressed into a much shorter amount of time: I’m missing the luxury of months-long weird silences. I’m pretty worried her brother is going to die soon but I don’t really have anything to do with it.
On Wednesday afternoon I took a coach bus from Boston to New York straight from her doctor’s appointment. There were four people on it including a German tourist who had been excited to experience American transit and seemed generally disappointed by it. I realized five minutes in to the four and a half hours that I had forgotten my headphones, so I passed most of the time trying to remember enough Mandarin to eavesdrop on the bus driver’s phone calls. It was gratifying to realize I could still pick out roughly where his accent was from and when he was shooting the shit and when he was talking to his boss.
On Thursday I went to the Jewish museum to see the late Klee show and say hi to Yael. The angel of history got stuck in Israel due to history (ha ha): there was a whole special little room dedicated to it but it wasn’t there, just a bad facsimile. I was feeling crabby and unsettled because of a very thorough security check and bad cramps. Sometimes being in New York gives me a funny feeling where I really start to notice that I’m living a version of my life I was very dedicated to imagining for a long time. At Dottie’s party for finishing her book a couple weeks ago we were talking about our shared childhood fantasy that living in a city as an adult would involve reading a book on a fire escape (I got this from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: I don’t remember where she got it). Some other persistent childhood fantasies of mine include reading a book while eating an apple (like Jo from Little Women) and writing in a composition notebook while being in New York City (like Harriet from Harriet the Spy). Going to a museum and getting a special little tour from my friend who works there on their lunch break is novel every time, as is going to a magazine release party and knowing the writers and editors: I made this up! I’m in high culture fantasy world! Thank god for racist museum security guards and bad cramps and getting a little high and nervous, or I’d lose all perspective.
I have cried most times I go to a museum or gallery since I was 16 and had a very strong reaction to Guernica. I did weep my way through the Klee show and was very starstruck by seeing my favorite menorah in person but fortunately the contemporary stuff was so annoying it calmed me down. When I texted Elio my postmortem he told me there was a show at some random fancy gallery in Tribeca (Ortuzar) that I might like so I went there because I had nowhere else to be. There was a 1:1 recreation of Peter Hujar’s final show, and then a bunch of downtown scene heavy hitters. The way that David Wojnarowicz writes about Hujar in Close to the Knives is so beautiful that I always want to give his work much more attention than it maybe actually warrants: Hellie says the problem with Hujar is he was in the right place at the right time to benefit from having much more talented friends, and ultimately she is right. I look at his work and I think it’s fine. There were 70 pictures in the show and they were all beautifully printed and I liked maybe 10 or less, but it was hard to tell whether the portrait of Greer Lankton was actually compelling or whether I was still excited from having seen several of her dolls one gallery over.
I’ve been kind of picking at Philip Gefter’s essay collection Photography After Frank: he was the NYT photo critic for a long time and most of the book is reprints of his articles, which means it does not lend itself to being read straight through. His favorite compliment so far is to call someone’s work “descriptive,” which I haven’t seen in a lot of photo criticism and can’t quite grasp what he means by. I like the way he writes about Bernd and Hilla Becher, who many transsexuals should be interested in because they took lots of photos of infrastructure, but I hadn’t been super compelled by their work looking it up on my phone. I wandered into the gallery next to Ortuzar and they had a whole wall with a Becher grid of water towers. The “grid of big beautiful expensive black and white prints” that had annoyed me in the Hujar show was very striking and beautiful here. I did find the pictures descriptive, I think.
This is getting quite long! The rest of my 36 hours in New York consisted of reading in a lot of parks, buying one book at Hive Mind, going to the Picnic launch party, having one delicious bagel and one disappointing one, hanging out with Joyce for ten hours straight, and having one very intense moment of missing my dad that I didn’t expect at all. I am very happy to be back in Chicago and to have no plans to leave anytime soon. I have surgery in two weeks, and you should hang out with me before and after.
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