themollyzone

[themollyzone]

for alan

My friend Alan died about a month ago. He was one of the first friends my then-boyfriend Chris ever introduced me to. I was coming from my friend's apartment in Manhattan and I met Chris, Alan and their other friend Matthew at Beauty Bar in Park Slope. It was a freezing winter, the first one I remember really disseminating the term "polar vortex," and I remember I was wearing snow boots and a big lumpy sweater. Not exactly dressed to impress, but I needn't have been worried about impressing anyone. The conversation flowed easily, and I felt included. I remember thinking, "Wow, Chris has such smart and funny friends." Alan was witty and warm. I was charmed by him immediately. Now Beauty Bar is closed, Chris is my husband, Matthew is my dear friend, and Alan is gone. I'm not sure if I've ever felt so old. There are stamps on the narrative that won't wash off now. It's a moment like this when the outer layer of the universe gets peeled back and you see the grinding gears of loss underneath, powering everything in secret the whole time. Soon after I started dating Chris, Alan moved back to California, where he grew up. We saw each other over the years in New York and in LA, and stayed in touch on Twitter. In some ways, I feel like I knew him better online than off — his writing was where I felt like I really was able to understand him fully. He was a writer and a poet. He had a Substack called Take Surface Streets where he'd write about Los Angeles culture and history through the city's geography. He had the sharpest mind and the most unique way of describing things. Chris was saying how it's wild that people might not even know how influential he was. Secretly influential — that's the power of Alan. He's the reason you all use the term "softboy," and the reason brands try and mostly fail to be funny on social media. He was down with the sacred and the profane: he could bust out the most gorgeous prose about some heady and romantic scenario, and then you'd remember his handle was @iluvbutts247.

He cared about people. He cared about people who everyone else had left behind. He fought for those people, literally. There's no other way to describe it: he was one of one. Like, look at this tweet. He just tweeted this out one night:

We had just been emailing about a project of his. He had been publishing these great little pamphlet zines — one of them made it with me from LA to NYC and back here in a box of books, thank god — and he was going to publish a new one, and asked if I wanted to write about music for it. I responded enthusiastically: yes! Actually I just looked at the email and I wrote "YES!!!" That someone like Alan found my words worth printing on real paper...it made my whole week, honestly. I was going to sit down and bang out out the piece the night I found out he had passed. I was going to write a few short blurbs about different local musicians who I had been randomly meeting out and about, because I thought he'd like that: people meeting people, in person, in Los Angeles, city of dreams, musical and otherwise.

It's weird that I feel like I owe him some copy. I thought about writing what I would have written for his zine, but I didn't want the musicians I'd write about getting unwittingly tied up in grief for someone they didn't know. I thought the best thing to do would be to take surface streets, as his newsletter suggested, so I went on a walk from Highland Park over to Glassell Park. For walking music, I first played Elliott Smith, who he wrote about in his newsletter — songs from Figure 8, the first record he made after moving to Los Angeles and the last record that came out when he was alive. Elliott Smith has always been a favorite of mine because he's totally unstuck from time. He'd already been dead for a year by the time I got my hands on XO my freshman year of high school, and his music sounded like it could have been made at any point in time in the past couple of decades. The arrangement on "Junk Bond Trader" is still one of the coolest things I've ever heard, with its layers of sound gracefully bowing to each other before getting out of the way.

Then I thought I'd be silly and play early Red Hot Chili Peppers, enjoying the juvenile funk of some Cali dirtbags with jester's privilege. It's funny how "Los Angeles music" can mean so many different things. Walter Becker from Steely Dan said that LA had a "laboratory-like sterile atmosphere to work in" — spoken like someone who has spent a lot of time riding around in a car, the ultimate sterile atmosphere. Dry AC, carefully calibrated stereo. Once you start walking, you start catching the real vibe of a place. Alan knew that and he celebrated it.

"Out In L.A" banging in my headphones, I turned around at the Glassell Park recreation center, where teenage boys were running dusty laps, and the pool was subdivided into lanes and sparkled sapphire, looking almost drinkable. I admired the Glassellland sign, a new sight to me. When I went home I looked up its origins: an artist named Justin put up the sign three times without permission, and after three teardowns, it finally stuck, with the help of a little local politicking that shepherded its status from "vandalism" to "public art." Ain't that just the way, I thought, smoking an imaginary cigarette.

It was hot, 85 degrees, with perfunctory sunshine curated by the "Visit California" tourism organization. Cold in New York, hot in LA. We were going to hang out when he came back to the city. "cannot wait for you to return and show us ur fave sights" was what I had emailed him. I'm honestly just lucky that he left a paper trail, and now I can follow it on my own.

When someone dies, especially someone young, you often hear some version of the sentiment of "I wish I had told them I loved them more," or "I wish I had told them what they meant to me." I understand this feeling, of course. It is only natural to want to go back in time and express your adoration to someone who's no longer here, and one of life's silliest jokes on human beings is the essential impossibility of communicating the entirety of your emotions to others: saying exactly what you mean, hoping they precisely understand.

And I can even look at our tweet history and see the times when I did tell him I cared about him, which is a strange gift of modernity: receipts. The nuance and near-misses and unsaid stuff, though — that's the friction that keeps everything humming. That's where the poetry is, painful as it may be. And I believe that when you think of someone after they've left this earth, they can feel it, wherever they are. And I believe that just thinking of them and remembering them will honor them, and will let them know, on some kind of quantum, cosmic-dust level, what you didn't say enough when they were alive. I believe that, because I simply have to. Alan, I'm going to remember you forever, I'm going to be reminded of you forever, I'm going to tell everyone I know about how cool you were for the rest of my life. Every time I see someone post about how sad they are that you are gone, it makes me sad but it makes me happy too, because that's another person on my team: Team Alan. Another person who gets it. I hope you are resting easy now.

To close out, I'm reprinting a bit of a post he wrote on Take Surface Streets back in February of this year about addiction, and deaths by overdose. It seems right to repeat what he wrote as I'm writing about his own passing, and if you read this, I hope you take his words with you — like everything else he wrote, they are true, and they are on fire.

When we lose a brother or sister in this community it is so often silent and secret. The cause of death isn’t mentioned right away, not in the news or the Instagram post captions. There is an ask of respect for the family’s grief. Of course! And then later we find out. Like it was some dark shame that should be hidden and snuffed out from community knowledge. But part of harm reduction is destigmatization. Not bullshit platitudes like “check in on your friends,” but screaming out loud: if you are a drug user, if you are shutting down your depression with opiates or anything else, I will help you. I will accept you and love you. Carry Narcan and carry hope. I don’t mean to sound like a sappy son-of-a-bitch, but we will hold each other when no one else will. The silence we seek in quieting our awful thoughts is the only silence that should be struck out when one of us dies. None of us are alone—and the culture of cutting out this part of our lives abandons those in need.

I won't be a party to it.

[themollyzone]

gifts of nyc lately

New York: one thing we can all agree on, is that it is a city.

A delightful treat to end a bonkers meal. Probably not very innovative to say that a luxurious meal at a restaurant, when it hits the right way, is like drugs. I will never not appreciate the gift of good food and drinks! I left positively buzzing. This is Cynar from the 1970s!!

Look at how I dressed to go to the club last weekend! This is not the club, of course. This is my apartment. But believe that I wore this Missy-Elliott-background-video-dancer ensemble out.

I truly need to understand the mindset of Manhattan Mini Storage. They've been doing edgy billboards for years and years. They seem to be getting edgier over time, even. I wonder how many people sign up for a storage space with them because they enjoy the sense of humour.

Fight Club.

I rarely paparazzi-shoot strangers on the street but this Rachel from Friends Knicks shirt was too good. I love the '90s nostalgia, lack of fear of wearing the visage of a woman to promote one's love of sports, and the Crocs and socks. We're living in a crazy time.

[themollyzone]

unfluencing

Lee Tilghman, aka former wellness influencer Lee From America, was featured in the NYTimes recently for her turn away from influencing and into a murky post-influencing lifestyle. I find her story fascinating!

I don't think I would have known about Lee if I hadn't been working at Well+Good. At the peak of her influence, she was posting elaborate smoothie bowls layered with neat toppings and gooey nut butters, managing her PCOS symptoms through something called "seed cycling" (basically eating different seeds at different times of the month to balance hormones), drinking gallons of matcha... Her wellness practices were incredibly photogenic, therefore perfect for IG, and she used the platform to reach an audience of people who were delighted by dreamy parfaits and who had serious health issues they were hoping to address outside of the realm of the doctor's office.

Classic wellness conundrum: there is way more to Health than prescription drugs and one-size-fits-all medical recommendations ("lose 10 pounds"); women's health especially is a realm of a ton of understudied pain; "wellness" of course is a zone ripe for scams, charlatanism and trickery. Plant medicine, for example, is thousands of years old and absolutely has real effects...but do you want to consume that ashwagandha in the form of a gummy marketed by a Kardashian?

I reached out to Lee's business email once during my time at W+G when I was producing videos. I want to say I was looking for a source to talk about smoothies, maybe matcha? Her response was a blunt ask for the editorial budget, which was zero, and I never responded to her. Her request was fair enough — in the Times article she said she her peak influencer take was something like $300,000 a year, which is obviously a healthy income, but also seems like not enough money to essentially live one's entire life online, post photos of every meal and beverage, act as a sounding board for strangers' health problems in the comments of IG posts, etc.

Lee's wellness arc ended with an announcement that her commitment to a life of juices and yoga and avoiding grains and "toxins" had left her orthorexic, and seeking treatment. Since then, she ditched the smoothieposting, had a brief interlude where she put up a lot of pictures of her rescue dog, was at one point going to study to become an interior designer, and now has landed in a position where she appears to be technically unemployed (by a traditional employer that is), publishing a newsletter to 20,000 readers, and hosting a workshop where she shows other influencers how to detach from and leave behind their influencer careers. She bills herself as an "ex wellness influencer recovering from too much kale."

I find her thing so interesting because it seems like even by calling herself as an ex influencer, she is now even still influencing...as an ex influencer. Influence as I am increasingly seeing it, is more than just posting about stuff you like and consume and having others like and consume it too — it is the embodiment of a combination of knowledge and taste that can only be expressed through you, yourself, your life. And the expression, ideally, involves some sort of personal stakes. People can get health advice from anywhere on the internet, and smoothie recipes from anywhere on the internet, but when that info is embodied in a person who you can look at and judge — judge their weight, the quality of their skin, the size and cleanliness of their apartment, their success in romance, the vacations they take, whether it looks like they're really having a good time — it becomes weighted, parasocial, and of course extreeeemely valuable to brands.

I have no idea what the content of Lee's un-influencing course is. I would imagine some of it would have to do with the process of detaching from the steady flow of attention that comes to you when you live your life online and others admire it. I can't imagine how addictive that shit is. I think we're only at the beginning of an understanding the addictiveness of internet attention, both good and bad. It's something I have to personally be careful about! I see a change in my own mood when I post something that a lot of people see and like. There's a certain mania that I feel when something I post goes viral. I recently put a TikTok up on the Alt's account that ended up with a modest amount of views, and it freaked me out. That many people have seen me, that many people have judged me in some way.

I feel like the common female American dream of the past century has involved monetizing being the center of attention. For a long time that meant being a movie star. Then it was being a model — runway model, Victoria's Secret model. Now it's being an influencer. Get paid to travel, paid to wear clothes, paid to do makeup, paid to eat food, paid to be. But the gap between the center of attention and the source of the attention is closing. You could have probably holed up in Hollywood while starring in motion pictures on a studio contract and stayed relatively unbothered. Maybe you'd have to answer some fan mail. Now you have a thousand people a post screaming at you because you once said you were avoiding gluten and now you're eating a bagel. Is it worth it to build a particular brand online if it means you can't change? Even though you're no longer peddling a lifestyle that contributed to your own eating disorder?

I keep saying privacy is going to be the last real luxury. I'm imagining some kind of demifluencer, who has taste and style and a point of view, but who hasn't posted in a way that has people drawing floor plans of their apartment or stalking their preferred workout class.......monetizing mystery.......

[themollyzone]

one million dollars

Last night I went to a show in Ridgewood. I'd taken a little bite out of a weed gummy, I'd say 2 mg worth, which in my casual longitudinal study of "how much THC is enough to get my brain thinking thoughts I really want to tweet" appears to be the Minimum Tweet Dose Threshold.

I was looking around me, everyone was young, as is custom these days, and the outfits were pretty funny. I saw one guy wearing a form-fitting bright green short-sleeve shirt that had emblazoned on the back an illustration of a bowling ball crashing into some pins. And I saw another guy next to him and he looked like he was wearing bowling shoes. Different guy. Another guy wore a shirt whose pattern was a deck of playing cards. I had the thought that some of the Gen z hipster types in new york city tend to dress like what happens when you are in the character builder for The Sims and you let the game randomize their outfits.

Then I was like, that'd be a good tweet, I think. But I didn't want to get into generational discourse online because I was not ready for the smoke that could result. I swear that I am impressed by and respecting of the unique sartorial choices of the youth — I swear! They come up with shit I could never come up with. They're in the thrift stores fighting for their lives. Meanwhile I'm trapped in a millennial vortex of sartorial respectability. I could have worn the outfit I wore last night to a job interview.

I went to the show with my friend from college, who has a band I think is simply great. We were meeting there ostensibly to talk about plans for making a new music video together, which we did, and then we kvetched a little bit about the current state of work. I was like, "I'm so full of ideas for groovy content. I want a million dollars, and to give it away to people to make little shows, like MTV." And she was like "I don't want to work anymore, I just want to rock."

This bit of conversation I had with nu metal CEO Holiday Kirk in my newsletter really tickled me. The ideas and the interest are out there...where's the MONEY?

I keep listening to the 100 Gecs song "One Million Dollars" as a spell / manifestation so that someone gives me one million dollars, but at some point I'm going to have to ask for it directly.

[themollyzone]

the angle

Ooh the internet is getting REAL WEIRD for me these days. It wasn't until after he died that I learned the reason my paternal grandfather was so into college sports (especially basketball) was because he thought professional sports were rigged, so college ball fandom was the only pure and honorable option. It's taken me a while to get into Conspiracy Grandpa status but it's starting to happen in a very particular way.

Specifically, I find myself seeing the way people craft their internet identities and output and saying: I don't believe it. Recently a young woman's thrift haul went viral on TikTok for being impressive and jealousy-inducing, then broke containment and went viral on Twitter where a lot of people were mad at her for scooping up cheap duds and reselling at a premium.

The original impressiveness of the video was supposed to be about buying a lot of desirable clothing all on the same day from the same store — I watched the video and was like, how are we supposed to believe that unless we watched her shop live? Twitch-streaming a purposeful skulk down the aisles of her local Goodwill?

Maybe she was collecting the best bits from a few different trips and combining them. After all, you don't go viral for buying just a couple cute things. You go viral for extremes: the most, the least, the cutest, the cheapest, the "most insane". I edit videos for a living and you have basically 2ish seconds at the beginning of a video to get peoples' attention so you can promote whatever it is you need to promote (in that thrifter's case, her cornucopian Depop shop). Your chosen thesis statement better be Entertaining.

Now there's a woman who has gone viral for being a tradwife, breasting boobily around her house and making terrible-looking home-baked bread for her alleged husband. The whole thing is sooo cosplay, and everyone's getting so upset about her content that they are forgetting she is not a housewife at all — she is a content creator. If you look at her Instagram from before she picked this particular Shein Marilyn Monroe Don't Worry Darling-style personal brand, she was trying to be a fitness influencer, posting about gains and doing that thing where you place a barbell over your hips and thrust vigorously.

The current internet is built for being reactive to the smallest and most impactful bit of information available. It is why people freak out about tweeted headlines without reading the full article, and why that account Pop Crave loves taking celebrity quotes out of context and riling up bloodthirsty fanbases for engagement, and why you can see one video of a "tradwife" looking like a Mad Men extras casting reject and don't bother looking back in her post history to see her recent-past self, striving in contemporary spandex and using hashtags like #fitfam.

That Natalie Portman movie Vox Lux was terrible but it had a silly line in it that I loved, where Nat's deranged Staten Island pop star character talks about personal branding for artists: "“It doesn’t matter anymore if you’re Michelangelo, or if you’re Mikey and Angelo from New Brighton. All that matters is that you have an angle." Internet fame is the carrot dangling on the stick, and to catch the fame, you need the angle, and you edit what you need to edit in order to hone your particular angle. In a sea of thrifters, you must get the most "insane" haul. In a sea of identical blonde fitness influencers, you must find a path of lesser resistance. Sweating to the oldies, indeed!!

Can you be mad at these people? I would say mostly I am impressed. I am excited to see in particular which sponsors the tradwife will secure in order to fund her future endeavors, because I do not believe her supposed single-income household will provide the financial backing she will need once she reaches higher levels of internet fame/infamy and wants a lifestyle to match. After all, the main brands who do influencer marketing are generally those who cater to girlbosses, not tradwives — subscription meal kits for homemade flavors on a time budget, blue light-blocking glasses for long days spent content creating on the computer, online therapy for the anxiety caused by capitalism.

That's the last question you need to answer when you are making content for free on the internet - where will the money eventually come from?

I just texted my dad to confirm my grandpa's rigged pro sports beliefs and he said yes, that was his theory — "Believe he used the term 'scripted.'" Keep your third eye open people!!! But wear third eye sunglasses to minimize UV exposure.

[themollyzone]

things that freaked me out recently

Uhhhh you guys ever see this shit?? I was skulking around Bushwick killing time before filming a band perform at a battle of the bands-style competition and needed some energy. To my surprise at the Walgreens was this crazy digital drink window. It was actually dark when I first came upon it, and lit up when I grabbed the handle.

Digitized facsimiles of energy bevraginos! FREAKY! Was I living under a rock? Have I been sleeping on the pixel representation of caffeinated (and otherwise) cans until this moment? The Matrix was a documentary. I went for my new love of the moment, Celsius, in the kiwi guava flavor. I don't think I've ever eaten a real honest to god guava. Should I cop a guava? Digital representation of a beverage representation of a tropical fruit. Zoom in.....enhance.

My woman-doctor's office is in Soho and I make my appointments in the morning, meaning I can get a great Soho experience in the crisp am without having to slice through a phalanx of TikTokers. Of course, everyone I do see in Soho on an early weekday hour is dressed to the nines. One of the most confusing things about 2023 NYC is that even otherwise basic girls wear leather pants now - in the daytime! I always thought of leather pants as 'weeding out the fakes' but we're living in an edgy time, I guess.

Speaking of weekdays, I went to a party with Chris on a Wednesday night. I knew it was going to be an indie sleaze revival type of happening so I wore my Ziemba t-shirt that says FEELINGS ARE REAL and, I think, evokes the STOP BEING POOR Paris Hilton moment. Sitting in the party's locale's little pleather-booth section, I had an out-of-body experience as all around me, young women photographed each other thoroughly. The women were prowling around the banquettes, kicking their feet up in the air, pouting and smirking. As a veteran of many cycles of America's Next Top Model-watching, I could confirm that each of these women had It. They were beautiful and knew their angles.

I felt a daffy sensation of incapacity. I am sooo bad at consciously posing for photographs. My college Facebook albums are full of me and other girls throwing up peace signs, smushed together in group pics with smiling faces turned to the sky like sunflowers, sticking out tongues. God it's like every photo of me taken between 2008 and 2012 is the "let's take a silly one" one. Somewhere around the advent of Instagram, the need for advanced posing solidified, and a generation of women galloped off into a more photogenic sunset without me. I can't get mad at it, it's just one of the ways I'm getting cryogenically frozen in my past youth's time, like Austin Powers in the 1960s. Every time I try to take a photo to evoke the current pose vogue, like making my face look very dead, I end up feeling silly.

Chris took pity on me and did a "photo shoot" and I liked how the pics turned out. In the end I simply just need to be having fun at all times and if I stay still for too long it stops being fun!

The Cobrasnake took a pic of me at the party. I would describe getting photographed by the Cobrasnake as similar to when Javier Bardem used that cattle gun on the guy whose car he was trying to steal. BOOSH! - FLASH! - what the FORK just happened???? I grow old, I grow old....I shall wear the bottoms of my skinny jeans rolled.....

[themollyzone]

field trip

Last January I took a dream solo train trip from LA to Chicago in a roomette and it started my year off auspiciously, with much time to self-reflect alone and, like, stir the contents of my brain slowly as if making a soup. All while 'riding the rails' of course. This January such a large undertaking was not possible but I did carve out enough time to do something EXTREMELY fun: take a short train trip to a nearby city for the purpose of looking at some specific art.

It was on a different train trip that sliced down the right bank of the Hudson River that I was like, damn the Hudson River School really snapped when they started painting the sublime. I googled "museum with Hudson River School paintings" and the result that came up most vigorously was the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. They boast "over 65 works by the movement's noteworthy artists." Ok, accessible! So I bought Amtrak tickets, booked a hotel and got psyched for 24 hours in Hartford.

Is there anything better than a rail yard?

My $100 a night hotel room had the dreamiest view of the state Capitol. Boy, wasn't I in clover!

I walked around a bit. Downtown Hartford had the kind of midwinter blasted modular emptiness that I, usually mired in the center of the rat king of NYC population density, could romanticize.

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Hartford. I also grew emotional reading several plaques about the city's effort to re-forge a path to its riverfront after first railways and then the highway cut it off from citizen access. I just get so misty when I think about municipal governments allocating resources and committing to great undertakings for the benefits of their residents. I mean, I recently teared up reading about the WPA!

I ate some very good mac & cheese, enjoyed lots of Shark Tank, and went to bed. Good night, Hartford.

ART DAY. The Wadsworth Atheneum is a lovely building.

I warmed up to my eventual arrival at the HRS collection, starting in a section about cabinets of curiosities.

If I had that in my home I'd never shut up about it.

Still Life With Ham and The Lazy Italian Woman.

The museum's size was perfect, not overwhelming like The Met. I found almost all of the paintings to be interesting in some way. Such is the power of 'curation.' Satisfied by the 17th through 19th century European art, I moved on to the Hudson River School, tucked away in the back of the museum past the contemporary exhibit of works made of glass.

Fuckin yeeeeaaaaaaa the sublime!!! Obviously so beautiful. But of course like all of art, the sublime is basically impossible to divorce from politics and from the artifice of mimesis. (Academic enough for u? I did attend college.) Like, you can't paint a gorgeous American landscape without also signifying that manifest destiny is good and right and committing genocide to fulfill it is only necessary. Likewise a lot of the landscapes were composites, existing nowhere truly in actual nature. I loved this painting done by Martin Johnson Heade called Gremlins in the Studio II where the impossibility of truly capturing nature is represented by a painting within a painting and then a weird little guy underneath.

Still I got drunk on the sublime, as you do. I cleansed my palate (palette? ART JOKE) with some Surrealism, and then with the glass exhibit which was truly stunning. A wall of American desserts rendered in glass really tickled me and made me think about the magic of treats, the painfully limited pleasure of a slice of cake, and then of course, my mom making box brownies and allowing whichever kid was nearest the reward of licking the mixer or rubber spatula.

Nearly fully sated, I closed out my visit with a stunning trip into a dark cave displaying video art, where I watched Paul Wynne Journal, a series of video diary entries from 1989 and 1990 that document a former TV journalist's experience with AIDS up to the point of his death. I'd never heard of the project before and I highly recommend watching it—one of the videos shows him planning his own memorial service and it's so funny, sweet and terribly sad!

Holy cow...that was a lot of art. It was time to leave, and I saw my last bit of unintentional art outside the train station. Shout out Suzanne Flathers.

The train home, like all trains home, had more "commuter sludge" vibes than "magical journey" vibes but that was ok. A mere 24 hours in Connecticut put my brain through the washing machine on a high spin cycle, and I am ready to face the rest of the winter bravely, as well as to continue to find the sublime on a train platform.

[themollyzone]

"i'm the dj"

I wanted to write about my DJ experience while it still feels fresh! I am positively zingy after "spinning some tunes" with some buds at the Elsewhere Loft last night. It was a soiree that came together after having a few "we should totally do this" conversations at parties, which turned into an email thread, which turned into a thing that happened in person. Shocking, stunning, unprecedented!

I (obviously) went stir crazy during Covid lockdown and got my ya-yas out by attending virtual DJ streams and vibing with people in zoom rooms. One of the thoughts I had during that time was: when we are allowed to hang out in person again, I would love to throw a party! It took some time (technically I did throw a party last year...a big one...my wedding) but it finally happened. Chris taught me how to rudimentarily mix on his DJ equipment, Laura hooked us up with the Elsewhere billing, everyone brought their friends, I met some And Introducing listeners. I got sweaty on the dance floor and spilled Red Bull all over myself which felt...good.

I also got to put into practice some things that have been important to me in theory, like being very courteous to the venue staff who supported the event. As a Venue Respecter it was fucking cool to be on the talent side of things and see just how much work goes into nightlife. Dozens and dozens of venues in just NYC alone do that shit every NIGHT. Just so people can have some fun!!

Not to sound like a completely pretentious ass hat but uhhh as I continue on my clubbing...journey...one of the sort of philosophical tenets I keep coming back to and sort of tumbling like a gemstone in my brain is this idea of Energy In, Energy Out. Like, no space exists just to entertain you, and you are not a passive vessel of entertainment reception. The Club is not a vacuum. You must participate, you must pay the energy toll! You can of course be set up for success by a swanky venue, good music, high-quality sound, etc. but the surest way to have a great night out is to put in the energy to have a great night out, and then that energy will come back to you. Dance, talk, be friendly, put vibes outward, and you will get all of that in return, and much much more.

I saw a TikTok a while ago where a young woman was making NYC bar recommendations (very common TikTok format...we love a recommendation don't we folks). I can't remember which bar she was talking about, but she dissed a bar for having "no vibes." Now, I have definitely been in bars where the vibes were off. Usually the kind of fake dive bars that have a kitschy aesthetic but are very clean and beers are $8. But I argue you cannot say a bar has "no vibes." My good bitch: you are the vibe. A bar without people in it is just a room that has some beer taps and a long table. If you find yourself constantly looking around where you are and being like, hmph, no vibes, I encourage you to look within yourself and draw those vibes out. Fun is not a hose spraying you from some unknown water source. Fun is more like a river that flows to the ocean which gets evaporated into clouds and then rains over the river. To be clear I have no idea how weather works.

When I was in high school we had this thing called...homeroom. It was 15 minutes after the 2nd period of the day, right before lunch started, and you had the same homeroom every year of high school. I am 99% sure it was just a way for teachers to see if anyone had ditched school that day. There was a lot of sitting, fiddling, and gossiping. If you had a good homeroom teacher, they let you vibe out a little bit. I had an excellent homeroom teacher, Mr. Cox, an English teacher. Sometimes he would put a Phish DVD on the classroom TV, and he let us do huge and loud group card games as well.

I bring this all up to say that when I was a junior, my friend in my homeroom class and I wanted to throw dance parties. If I recall correctly, someone brought in their iPod dock (!!!) and someone else brought party lights and we turned the lights off and boogied. Kids from other homerooms started coming to the dance parties and then we kind of got in trouble and those kids had to go back home(room).

I forgot I had done that for a while and unearthed the memory. A lot of my past life ends up being a breadcrumb trail for stuff I end up doing again in different formats. Being obsessed with recording "songs" on a tape recorder is now podcasting. Being obsessed with music videos is now making music videos. I'm not new to me, it turns out.

[themollyzone]

number 1 song in heaven

Ah January austerity. I am working out, eating my vegetables, working diligently on several new creative projects and trying to learn to DJ. I have planned a solo trip to go look at some Hudson River School paintings in Connecticut because I need the sublime in my life, and am about to plan a group trip with college friends to go somewhere warm. I keep making lists of things I want to do and stuff I want to watch. Like, I have never gone to Arby's before. If the world ends before I have my first Arby's sandwich, did I really live?

When I was home for the holidays I watched The Sparks Brothers with my dad and it got me so hype I wanted to rip a telephone book in half. Definitely one of my favorite music docs in recent memory, with editing in particular that was just so tasty. Personally for me, one of my main goals when I edit videos is to "take people by the hand" and lead them to a particular location of thought I had in my mind, and Edgar Wright, god bless him, took me by the hand and showed me how sick Sparks are.

I now of course am obsessed with "The Number One Song In Heaven." Any song Joy Division listened to when they wrote "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is going to be instantly iconic to moi. The Moroder synths and fast tempo and falsetto vocals....oh yeah. There's a stanza I noticed in particular when I was walking home from the post office in the rain with my new headphones blasting the song:

If you should die before you wake If you should die while crossing the street The song that you'll hear, I guarantee It's number one all over heaven

Do you know how often I worry about 'accidental death' and freak accidents? It is not an insignificant amount of time. The stories of death that take up space in my brain are usually stories of unexpected, sudden, tragic death—a friend whose friend was hit by a truck that didn't stop at a crosswalk, Anton Yelchin getting killed in his driveway, crowd crushes at concerts, things like that. It freaks me out that I'm so very careful (working out, eating my vegetables) and yet there are forces beyond my control that do not give a shit how careful I am. "If you should die while crossing the street" — not to be dramatic but I almost die crossing the street in New York City every day!! I saw a map of traffic accidents from 2022 and it was bonkers! That shit is real!!

That's why I find "The Number One Song In Heaven" to be so great. The Sparks brothers have solved the problem of being one accident away from dying, by creating a song that is so pleasurable to listen to that it previews how great heaven will inevitably be, washing the worry away. Why worry about dying when you can have a piece of heaven on earth? Why panic about the inevitable when you are not dead now and you can listen to music?

[themollyzone]

2022 RECAP BABY!!!!!!!

Rather than bore everyone on Twitter with a long thread, why not just put all the shit I did this year in a BLOG POST.

First here's a photo of me so you can imagine who is doing all this stuff. This is what I look like and my environs, all the time.

I directed a music video for Shybaby and it premiered on Paper Magazine dot com. Pretty fuckin swag if I do say so myself. This is my fourth video for Grace and her band and the first where I directed and didn't shoot it. (These are the others I have done.)

I interviewed so many people for The Alternative on the show I developed called Get Involved. It's just me talking to music people about what they are working on and excited about. I love doing it sooooo much! Here's the full playlist of that; highlights include heavy metal tuba, Threatening Music Notation, a weird Texas rock band on a West Coast Tour, experimental music made by someone I met at a hyperpop dance party, vaporwave, backstage chilling at Our Wicked Lady, ambient field recording electronic tunes, and a guy who is changing rock music forever.

I also have been putting a lot of shit on The Alt's TikTok right now so go follow it for only the absolutely best in snackable music video content.

I guested on some podcasts including Fluxpod (talking about flop eras in February aka Flopuary), Dream Logic (talking about a weird dream I had, but I swear it was edited in a way that is more entertaining than me just telling you about my dream), Explaining To Austin (talking to host Peyton Brock about indie sleaze), Indieheads (talking about some of the Best New Music of the 2010s as decided by Pitchfork Magazine), Generation Loss (talking about 500 Days of Summer)....I think that's it? Podcast.

Podcast........I podcasted myself also, for my own podcasts. And Introducing had a bit of a flop era but we got some good shit in there — Bob Dylan Chronicles with the Jokermen dudes, Peter Steele with Ryan from AntiArt, the Elvis movie with David Sims. We had founding Maroon 5 drummer Ryan Dusick on, we celebrated Matthew Perpetua's 20 years of Fluxblog, the Jimmy Buffett episode was one of my all time faves, Flea was great too, and I also liked talking about GAYLE and the current state of music marketing. THERE WILL BE PLENTY OF AND INTRODUCING PODCASTS IN THE NEW YEAR.

We're also on page 800-something of Infinite Jest for our Infinite Jest reading podcast Infinite Cast, a podcast that this year took us to multiple states and even international waters. We recorded in Italy lmao. In an odd Roman hotel! On a round bed. Oh man you should have seen it. We recorded in an airport hotel, a porch on an Airbnb in Idaho, and of course mostly on the couch at home. Honestly this particular podcast is like my lil baby, my special child, and I will be sad when we definitely, absolutely, totally wrap up this book by mid-next year.

Oh shit I also did a little bit of writing! For Grandma Sophia's Cookies, I wrote about Coachella and why press coverage of it is always so weird. And I blogged obviously.....right here....on the blog you are reading right now.

I went to so many concerts this year and I recapped those delightful times on my Instagram.

I also did some video work for money but let us be serious: you do not need to see this work. I do my best work for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I took a picture of the moon. It's not professional or anything but I was walking home from a shoot with all my camera stuff and was like, ok, the moon is so right and I am tired of it not showing up on my iPhone. Even though really I think the moon is too beautiful to ever "capture" in a photo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Firsts of the year: I baked my first Bundt cake and my first ever tart. I did my first whippet. (Whip-it? Whippets are dogs.) I took my first Amtrak trip in a roomette. I crowd surfed for the first time (granted it was at my wedding karaoke party and it was maybe like 10 people total in the "crowd" but I'm counting it).

Oh I also got married, or rather had my wedding, after 2 years of postponement. That ripped for sure. The sickest thing about having a wedding is you stress out about it to no end but once it's over, they can't take it away from you. It's not a possession or an object of value, it's an event that happened and now it lives (rent free) in your memory. No one told me! I'm so happy about it!

Wow I did so many things. I'm tired! Next year I will chill. Or will I?????

[themollyzone]

a cycle I ponder sometimes

[themollyzone]

end of show garbage pic

If you go to a music concert, I highly recommend taking an "end of show garbage pic" afterward.

I know garbage is very bad. It's insulting and disrespectful to our Mother Earth. I have been known to, when witnessing people litter in New York City (which happens all the time and sucks ass) go and grab whatever they tossed on the street and bin it. And when I go to concerts, I throw out my trash!! I promise!

I wrote a bit about live music event garbage in this post-2021 Governors' Ball report for Grandma Sophia's Cookies:

"The sight of post-fest garbage feels a bit sad but also kind of poignant and funny. There’s so much waste, but it’s enclosed—cloistered trash."

(is it weird to quote...yourself...in a blog post? oopsie daisy)

Yes, it is not great to throw your crushed cans and spent water bottles all over the ground at a show. But there's something zesty about embracing the garbage vibes with a photo. Your hair and makeup will not look as good as they did at the beginning. You will be sweaty. You might be a bit trashed yourself. That's a good thing! It means you enjoyed yourself. Sort of the musical equivalent of taking a photo with the carcass of whatever big game you hunted that day, Teddy Roosevelt style. "I lived, bitch."

Trash pics also align nicely with another concert strategy of mine which is to wait until the absolute last minute to leave the venue. Let everyone else amble out, and get clogged in the exits, and take lil baby steps to get out of there, and pile up on the escalators. Enjoy the freshly emptying vibes and the aura of a venue newly adorned with the, like, musical patina of the past several hours. Wait until security says "ok time to go folks" and then of course leave.

Take the 'cute group pics' and maybe a saucy selfie or two. But also take an end of show garbage pic. You will not regret it.

[themollyzone]

before december gets too long

I love love love December for the end of year feeling. Not in the "top 10 albums of the year" feeling but more of a general reflective wrapping up and looking ahead. I take the New Year very seriously and believe it can offer up the elusive New Me.

One thing I always do in December is clean out my emails and all the files on my computer. It's a compulsive-ish habit but it makes me feel great. Likewise I deep-clean the apartment. If I'm really on top of it, I'll do a tarot reading, but I just got a real doozy of a reading at my birthday party that I'm still chewing on — specifically an 8 of Cups I'm trying to masticate until it gels with the vision I have for my future. Don't cry over spilled milk, they say, but what about a missing cup? Where the fuuuck did I put that cup??

I feel like I'm exiting 2022 in a state of pleasant disillusionment. The vibe is very strawberry fields / nothing is real / nothing to get hung about. When I was in high school I needed to mark my territory to feel like I existed. I had light blue high top Converse sneakers—I was trying to be punk, but light blue was apparently my favorite colorway....girl why....—and my friend and I wrote song lyrics on them in black Sharpie. You know how it is. One of the lyrics I wrote was "living is easy with eyes closed" because I thought it was deep as hell. Now the verse I'm stuck on is this one:

I had a couple of lucid dreams this year for the first time ever, which was nuts. Each time I realized I was dreaming, the first thought that ran through my brain was: ok now I can do anything I want, and it won't matter, because it's not real. I won't tell you what I did, of course. Nunya bizness! Taking acid in the 1960s must have been pretty nuts too. One minute you're eating some kind of green bean casserole prescribed to you by the Campbell's soup company, the next, the entire world has turned into an Impressionist painting before your eyes. It is much harder to take the concept of "reality" seriously when you're on psychedelics. All you can do is hope you know when it's a dream.

At the end of February, I was taking a train from Virginia back home to New York and feeling sad and not very useful. I should get a job, I thought, a real one, one job with one boss. I was feeling burnt out on freelancing and insecure about my technical skills. So I found a job, and that job has turned out to be one of the silliest patches of employment I've ever experienced. I can't even get into it but it's just more proof that nothing is real—certainly not employment, certainly not my type of employment.

"I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real." What prize do Chris and I win for being the most enthusiastic receivers of the message of "Losing My Edge" at the AmEx LCD Soundsystem gig? A pretty nice tote bag and a horse kick hangover. I could never throw my computer out the window. You can make real stuff on the computer! I swear I do it all the time.

When I was in Prospect Park on a gray and wet day, hunting down Peter Steele's special dedicated tree, I had the stoned thought that my personal artist statement might be something like "bringing the internet to real life and vice versa." It was tickling me that I was on a quest I was posting about on the internet, but I was also literally touching grass while on the quest. I cannot be totally on the computer all the time or I'll freak out, but there is no arguing that the computer is pretty important to what (I think) I do. It all interconnects: I'll email someone to interview them, and then I'll meet them in real life, and they'll recommend something for me to read, and the reading inspires me to look something up, and then I talk about it with other people, either online or in person, on and on, online and not.

I'm currently blogging on a mechanical keyboard I recently bought because I followed someone on TikTok who was into mechanical keyboard modding and I'm always looking for uh...new ways to type. It lights up in beautiful unicorn colors, but more importantly, it's loud as hell. I thought it might help to engage the ego when I'm making stuff for the internet. I clack therefore I am. I have some big plans for next year and I'm simply going to need a super loud keyboard for them.

[themollyzone]

martini time

When I was in my early 20s — I want to say I was 23 — my friend and I decided we needed to officially try martinis to determine whether we liked them. It seemed like it was Time. We were young women in the big city and we needed a big city drink to match our energy.

My collegiate drinking career was of course not very classy: cheap beer, screwdrivers, indeterminate liquors from plastic handles mixed with various soft drinks in large bottles, ready to be smuggled into comedy shows and a capella recitals to make them marginally more interesting. The booze was meant to be inexpensive and portable and very potent. Senior year I tried to elevate my taste after I binged several seasons of Mad Men but I didn't have patience for anything requiring lots of technique or ingredients or equipment, so my drink of choice was a Manhattan....a Jameson Manhattan....which I now realize Irish whiskey is not a mixologist's first choice for a Manhattan....whatever, it was more chic than Four Loko!

Anyway — New York Fuckin City, 2013ish — time to take things to the next level. We planned a night to go out and try our first official martinis, doing cursory research ("best martini in manhattan") and landing at a place called Gin Palace that is now, like most places from my past in New York, closed. The photos of Gin Palace suggested class, sophistication, leather, brass, mirrors. We entered and they were blasting pop hits of the day at colossal volume. I was expecting jazz! Shrugging, we entered and placed our order at the bar. If I recall correctly, I believe we asked for "whatever the most normal version of a martini is" so surely we got a gin martini, up, with olives.

The main seating we were faced with was a sort of bleacher-style behemoth. Imagine us girls, dressed nicely, with these sloshingly full martini glasses in our hands, now faced with the task of climbing up to our seats. Somehow we did it. The next lesson we learned was that you really do need to drink a martini quickly in order to get the most out of it before the returns start to diminish. Here is Blur bassist Alex James on martinis:

"When you've lost all your friends in New York, it's time to have a dry martini. The New York dry martini is a bit of Western voodoo. It's the ultimate cocktail. Administered correctly, it parts the clouds of fear and the brilliant sunshine of resolve floods the darkest corners of the mind...a good martini is a pure concentrated triumph of minimalism."

He's right, though we didn't know it yet. But I do remember it did the job. It tasted very interesting in a way that I knew I wanted to pursue further. I could feel my past self, tanked on way too many Captain-Morgan-and-Pepsis, or else half a magnum of Barefoot Moscato so sweet it could attract bugs, melting away into oblivion. (She's not completely gone of course; I will always be a sucker for a novelty cocktail or tinned bev, and have been still deploying the classic prank Smirnoff Ices for sport in the year of our lord 2022.)

The martini was a real magic trick, and the prediction we had about it came true: it cured us, it matured us. You know in a movie where an explosion goes off and the sound goes all wonky and underwater, like a quantum energy tsunami has whooshed over everything and it makes everyone's ears ring? Martinis are like that, but in a good way. Anti-stress, pro-social. The perfect cocktail.

We drank and yelled over the music until the last sips of the martini were kind of warm. Drake was blasting on the speakers and we both watched as a young woman next to us administered one of the most consistent, lengthy and enthusiastic lap dances to her male companion that I've ever witness in my entire life. She was bouncing up and down like her life depended upon it and her quadriceps were made of titanium. That's the thing about a martini night in NYC — the martini might be the only 'elevated' thing you experience in said night, but what else do you need?

[themollyzone]

LCD Soundsystem @ Brooklyn Steel....it's so humbling to think that "yuppie" stands for Young Urban Professional...because at what point do you age out of yuppiedom, and then what do you become next? "Losing My Edge" til I fuckin die. 1 nitrous balloon please!

[themollyzone]

it's a bird

it's a plane

it's DIVE BAR BATHROOM GIRL

[themollyzone]

Doing my end-of-year computer cleanup / cleanout and am sharing some photos from Coachella this year that look like they were taken in 2007 because they were taken with a camera that was released in 2007.

top left - right before the first set of the whole weekend (Mika). weekend 2 attendees sacrifice picturesque green grass in favor of 95% fewer influencer photoshoots (just amateur influencer photoshoots like mine!). Do you like my translucent purse? Can you see the Orbit gum and Ricola lozenges I brought to the grounds in the hopes of not losing my voice, as I do every year on Friday? You can see how well that went in this episode of Infinite Cast.

top right - Chris waiting for campsite breakfast burrito ($700)

middle left - Amber Mark - one of the great treats of the fest is going to sets with your friends that you might not have gone to on your own and then enjoying music you have not previously heart — the ol' "breakfast buffet approach" to a festival, taking a scoop of an unfamiliar food that looks good — and Amber Mark was one of these! Very smooth, chill, charming R&B.

middle right - me trying on the plastic duck bill we received before going to see Duck Sauce. Duck Sauce fucked up my entire life. I was dancing like my life depended on it? I think my secret favorite dance music subgenre might be nü disco slash French house? I'm not a fan of fitness trackers for myself and yet I'd kill to see what my heart rate was for the duration of Duck Sauce's set. Some friends joined our group midway through the set, their arms full of bottles of Powerade, and for the first time in my life I felt like I really deserved one.

lower left - Chris before Duck Sauce, looking good

lower right - I think this was the Swedish House Mafia portion of the SHM/the Weeknd headliners on Sunday. The full set is on YouTube and boy oh boy this was one of those sets that I needed to watch again with my eyes because I simply wasn't watching the stage. This picture is also clearly a "I need to take a picture of what's happening without really thinking about what the framing looks like so I will look at it in the future and it will trigger a memory" photo.............literally a point....and shoot.......ok bye