For today, a big ol’ piece of writing about seeing a movie and eating White Castle with a longtime friend, and a selection of 35mm color film from Overheard’s second annual BigWalk.

This time we were joined by our friends Brendon Bigley and Percia Verlin. We walked from Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan to Coney Island, way at the bottom of Brooklyn!

You can see those here, and see some photos from and writing about last year’s BigWalk here!

Some news:

• Horsie’s first ever show is in Kingston on Friday, July 24th, at West Kill Supply. It’s free.

  

• I will be performing as Ghost Down at my beloved Buffalo, New York’s Revolver Records on Saturday, August 15th. Flyer to come!

Misc. Stuff I’m Into:

Music:

Olivia Rodrigo - you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

I think, more to come on this. Pop for crushing, ballads for heartbreak, music for the mania that tends to barnacle itself to the bottom of love. It is most certainly my album of the year so far.

Zack Fox - A COLORS MIX 010

It’s a Zack Fox mix, it’s gonna be incredible. Dude DJs with the same deft hand that wrote “I’ma dip my balls into some thousand island dressin’, cause I got depression.”

Wiki - Ancient History

The boricua NYC legend is back with bars tailored to the cracks in sweltering concrete.

Mötley Crüe - Dr. Feelgood

My friend and bandmate KT is famously a curator of the playlist “Washing a Trans Am While Wearing Daisy Dukes” (it’s private, sorry), so I knew I could count on them to suggest hair metal that would satisfy my weird and sudden craving a few weeks back. This record was absolutely that and more. I need to wear some leather.

Ween - The Mollusk

Even more to come, you might even be able to guess what!

As for singles…

the new Carly Rae Jepsen single “On Wires” is one of her best songs maybe ever;

New Quadeca track “Baby Steps” is excellent;

My homies in Honeythunder with another banger before their big Philly finale in two weeks;

and! Not a single but Queens of the Stone Age live on KEXP blew my mind.

Movies:

• My Dinner With Andre [1981, dir. Louis Malle]. More to come, if you couldn’t tell by the subject of this email.

• Phantom of the Paradise [1974, dir. Brian De Palma]. A movie that was informed by ten dozen things and informed ten thousand more.

• The Boy and the Heron [2023, dir. Hayao Miyazaki]. A necessary rewatch for my current moment.

• Tampopo [1985, dir. Jūzō Itami]. I love food, and food loves me!

Other Stuff:

• Mina the Hollower. I finished it! Holding two pieces of paper in my hand. One of them is a big list of complaints with the plot structure and shoddy platforming mechanics. The other is two words: ‘it’s goty.’

• Between the Knicks victory, and progressive wins in NYC’s most recent elections, Zohran appears to have the Mandate of Heaven.

• “All my lies are always wishes," Niko Stratis on the terrorization of trans people and the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

• Calls to action for the ongoing protests against ICE and in support of the hunger striking detainees at Delaney Hall in New Jersey!

• The work of incarcerated poets, in their own voices.

• Julianna Escobedo Shepherd on the Rosalía show at MSG, and lapsed Catholicism. I was at this one too but couldn’t see much, it was a solid show but I appreciate her writing about the images I didn’t have the seat to see.

**I talk about the evening I watched the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre below. I think that unlike most times I write about movies, this piece can be read without watching the movie, and it’s kind of a hard movie to ‘spoil.’ But if you have some plan to watch the film completely blind that you’re never going to follow through on, don’t read this!**

"He went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree and he said 'this is a pine tree.' He put it in my hand and he said, 'escape, before it's too late."

In a scene pounding with propulsion barely believable for a film about two men eating and talking, Andre Gregory likens New York to a prison, a concentration camp, where its residents are both the prisoners and the wardens, even the architects of the prison. He recounts the above warning from a colleague in the even-keeled old New York accent he's spoken in for most of the film, no more or less urgency in his voice than talking about being under a blanket with his wife.

Jawn looked at me and said:

"true or false?"

Jawn (real name John [REDACTED]) is an old and good friend of mine that I made on the internet, a kinship that started mostly via arguing in a mutual Facebook group, naturally. We were both born and raised in NYC, myself in Manhattan and the Bronx, he in Queens. I was shuffled out at somewhat of a formative preteen age, cementing my romantic view of the place and my desire to eventually return. He lived here for most of his life with his longtime partner, until it drove them to their wits' end. They had both spent their last years here gnawing at the bars of their Queens County cage, the COVID-19 pandemic finally busted the worn down lock, and they set themselves free.

I moved here a few years after they left, and have gotten to see Jawn a few times before and since. I liken his visits to that rumor that after quitting, you never really stop wanting a cigarette. We've gone to see The Armed, one of his favorite bands, in the concrete wonder of Forest Hills Stadium and the glorified basement of Le Poisson Rouge. We made the trek deep into Queens to the White Castle from Good Time, staring into the middle distance while eating sliders just like fictional Maspeth maniac Connie Nikas. I'll tell him about the wide variety of film screenings happening that are right in his wheelhouse and he'll wail at the sky for the loss of his beloved IFC Center, that which I have found.

---

On his most recent visit, amidst the mania of the Knicks in the finals, the World Cup, and what wildness NYC summertime brings as table stakes, we saw a film. I grabbed a ticket to Louis Malle's 1981 dialogue heavyweight My Dinner With Andre at Metrograph on a whim and the familiarity of the name alone. With how hard To Live and Die in L.A. rewired my brain chemistry last year, I've made it a point to try and see more films I know nothing about, but with titles that manage to carry their reputation far into our present of media hypersaturation. Jawn heard that was my plan for that Friday night and helped himself to a ticket because, as he later revealed, he'd seen it three times and needed to watch me watch this movie.

When we met up at the theater we almost immediately kicked off one of our old argumentative haunts, my love versus his hatred of summer. He was glaring at me for not suffering, his own body spiraling into a shutdown at temperatures that exceed sixty degrees, and I tried to achieve a middle ground of us both hating the humidity. The movie started and the chilling textures of NYC winter outlined Wallace Shawn's opening narration, where he lamented the titular dinner plan and described Andre as "a man I had been avoiding for years." Now I wouldn't say I avoid Jawn, I actually love hanging out with him. However, something we've both acknowledged is that he tends to be right, be really good at reading writing on the wall no matter how obfuscated, either in the present, or vindicated by the passage of time. Be it the Department of Defense using the MCU for money laundering, the spinelessness of establishment Democrats, or One Piece characters being inexplicably innocent of their crimes, he's always somehow early to the party, holding opinions like a decade before I eventually come around on them. And I can't even peg this on his being a hater, because he actually likes a lot of shit. An inexplicable amount of media widely considered unlovable even (David Ayer's Suicide Squad? Come on now). But this 'being right all the time' habit of his has recently made me uncomfortable because of my underlying fear that he was right to leave my favorite city on Earth.

"Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? And where am I going?"

As if performance art, Jawn had to leave the theater multiple times because of overheating, due to a warm stuffiness in the room that I wasn't even aware of. He happened to walk out during Andre waxing poetic of the collective empathy inherent to being cold, while Wallace extolled the virtues of his new electric blanket and being nice and toasty, akin to an aforementioned classic argument in the Jawn vs. Will catalogue. He also happened to walk out at the same time as someone else. While trying not to pass out in the lobby, he struck up a conversation with this person, who was attempting to relate with Jawn about leaving the showing of the abysmal slog My Dinner With Andre. He revealed that he actually loves this movie and only walked out because he was possibly going to die of heat exhaustion, much to this woman's chagrin. She cited her frustration with Andre's air of superiority and privilege, a frustration that I and Jawn felt was central to his character and our empathizing with Wallace in contrast. While desperately trying to get his body working again, he attempted to make a case for the film he was currently not watching, a case that failed as she hit the bricks. You really can, and maybe should, just up and leave if you're not having a good time.

He recovered and got back in just in time for a hooting and hollering half hour, our theater alight as Andre read our current generation's issues, contrasts, isolation, and dangerous tranquility for filth. Later he'd tell me that he was really hoping he hadn't missed 'the Holocaust bit,' the quote I shared earlier regarding New York City's status as a prison filled with and ruled by its inhabitants. Jawn and I shook each other's shoulders, and I remember thinking a thought I almost never think: "I need a cigarette." I did not have one.

---

It's easy to view Wallace and Andre's analysis of the 80's via the screenplay and Jawn's 'always being right' as a sort of prescience, a peering through a window into a tactfully detailed future. But slightly below the surface, all that's really happening is that the three of them are smart guys with open eyes. Jawn has an oft-maligned-by-him masters degree in English, and one can only do so much critical reading of text for school before that lens learns, is carried off the pages and pages of old literature, and into the crumbling world around you, bringing down a burning beacon of light. As Andre accurately diagnoses a future of noses in phones and activism-by-posting, algorithm dissociation and a separation of people from their bodies and the tangibility of others', he was just looking at the world of 1981 as it was. Jawn was looking at the United States political machine, enabling the War on Terror and putting no stop to immigrant kids in cages, and understood their capability of and culpability in future genocides a little earlier than myself and most of us that weren't victims. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

On the flip-side and for his part, I found Wallace's defense of comfort and the importance of our things very powerful. He spent most of the conversation silent and listening intently and eagerly, offering 'huh,' and 'really,' intermittently, sipping on one of his three of the six total beverages on the table, until Andre pushed a few too many buttons a little too self-righteously. Wallace was enthusiastic in reminding Andre that not everyone in NYC can whisk themselves off to Poland to have revelatory performance art experiences that awaken the nature of being; some people are just trying to (fucking) survive. Maybe we need those distractions, those comforts to make this frigid life bearable, to make it through the coldest NYC winter in decades.

Maybe I don't want to be cold, just to know that others are cold. Maybe what I want is to know that the cold can be escaped. Maybe one of my myriad daily battles, this one for the feeling in the tips of my fingers, is winnable.

It reminded me of what Wallace was carrying into this dinner, an all-too-familiar sock to the stomach:

"After all, I was already doing my best."

They eat their quail and keep volleying, a lament of the modern era hit back with the validity of getting by. Wallace has expectations that are perhaps too simple for his own good as an artist, and Andre is parading ideologies that are barely compatible with a burnt out and broke working class. However, Andre caps the dinner with a subversion of his pleading to Wallace and annoying the waiter, by sharing his realizations about identity and memory, the masks we wear and the roles we play in real life. He shared these words:

"A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?"

An absolutely surgical drop of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1" soundtracked the tears instantly streaming down my face. Lately I've been looking all over to find answers to this question of identity, to who we really are when the roles fall away, when grieving leaves holes to fill, when being a grandson or godson vanishes in a stinging cloud of smoke. Wallace and Andre met in the middle, with the former recounting the importance of all the little shops he passed on his cab ride home. The sordid, doomer narration of the introduction was abandoned in favor of vigor of a reaffirmed life and the wistfulness of one already half-lived.

---

Jawn and I were waiting out a sudden summer rain in the Metrograph lobby when I told him about my recent struggles and how that finale shot me through the chest with an arrow, and he told me all about his lobby chat with a disappointed stranger. For someone who I only see once or twice a year, the ease with which I revealed my confusion about my identity confused me even further. Maybe since he can read writing on the wall so well, I hold hope that he can read my situation for me as well. I wonder if that stranger thought the same thing.

We popped around the corner to see the Seward Park ping pongers before making our way to the Midtown Manhattan White Castle. We stepped over deep and wide subway puddles, through clouds of manhole smoke, and around meandering tourists into a desolate blue and white room. It was dinnertime and this was maybe the most empty I'd ever seen a White Castle in my life, and that includes the one in Nanuet, NY at 2 in the morning. They had already been booted a few blocks down from their original midtown location near the Port Authority, and with the impending closure of the aforementioned White Castle from Good Time, things maybe weren't looking good for the cheap slider mainstays' life in NYC in. That and the lack of inch-thick glass protecting the cashier from a potential robbery told me that this White Castle maybe wasn't going to be worth one of the few days I allow myself to eat beef in a year. I don't know why the burglarproof glass makes the White Castle taste better. Maybe it traps some of the steam?

We ordered our sliders and Jawn paid. He told me about his maintained love for this city, a giant sack of mid crinkle-cut fries that he can't get where he lives now, the ways that strangers will just start talking to you in a way they won't elsewhere. Watching the Knicks dominate the finals at his parents' Queens home. Narrowly avoiding a staph infection in the lakes that line the subway on rainy days. Even the fact that the print of My Dinner With Andre that we watched was in 35mm. He almost made it seem like staying here might have been worthwhile. But citing his and his partner's regained sanity, the community they've built in their new home, and the façade that life here is in any way accessible, he defended his decision to leave his birthplace. Almost knee-jerk, I started defending my reasons for coming back, how driving a car every day was killing me (I miss having a moving room to sing as loud as I want sometimes), how living in a place where only white people seem to be doing well wore down on my soul (New York City is not much better than the Hudson Valley with regards to non-white people doing well), how the noise helps me sleep (except when a motherfucker lays on their horn at 2 in the morning).

In listening to Jawn simply and calmly affirm his decision to leave Queens for greener pastures, I felt like Wallace, a fire being lit within me to defend my way of life, honor my role as prisoner and warden here. However, the one thing I didn't need to defend was the feeling, an idea that being here just feels right for me. I feel a spiritual kinship to this place, to my broken history here. I feel grateful for every stranger who asks me for directions, threatens me, just wants to talk to me at all. I love the walks, navigating the sporadic geography of my city and listening to all manner of people talk in all manner of language. I love the misery shared in our mutual scowls in winter, and the life the blue sky of summer breathes into us. It's much like the kinship I feel with Jawn, how you will meet some people and just know they're here for the long haul, how talking in an empty White Castle can somehow feel right. Even if what you're talking about is censored orgies in iconic works of fiction. That might net you a strange look from strangers. Or discussing the merits of certain assassination attempts. That might get you showered with glass as SWAT boots swing through the White Castle window right into your jaw.

We left full of stale sliders and made our way back to the station to say goodbye. As we walked down 8th avenue, we looked to our left to hear an extremely loud metal whirr. In the middle of a street packed with pedestrians, a hooded figure among several others took a circular saw to a bike lock. Wide, white sparks flew in an eight-foot-high arc through the air. The saw was quickly stuffed in a comrade's bag, and that comrade sped off on an electric bike. The kid who did the sawing followed swiftly, the group one electric bike richer.

The crowd largely moved on, barely commenting on the matter. We ain't snitches, after all.

Jawn looked me in the eyes and said:

"Escape."

---

Jawn and I once spoke over text about the film Past Lives, after I left a showing of it at Metrograph, similarly weeping. A fan like me of the time-heist spy thriller Tenet and the Ends-Justifying-Means cinema of the Dune movies, he said "what if your path was to stray from your path? What if by staying on your path you're straying from your REAL path?" I thought of this as we parted ways at 34th street station, my ramp going up and his going down in parallel, just like Hae sung and Nora's goodbye. He and his partner picked up shit and ran out of NYC shortly before my partner and I overhauled our lives to live here, and now our friendship is encapsulated in these fleeting, movie-like moments. I wonder if coming back here is the same for him as it is for me, if there isn't a street or building that isn't connected to some memory in his mind. I wonder if the memories sing louder now that he doesn't live here anymore, or if they're being pleasantly eroded away by the joys of a slightly slower life. I wonder if I'll ever forget how hard it was to sleep to solely the whistling of trees and the hum of a faraway train, and again wish for the quiet I used to be so desperate to escape from. I wonder if he's stayed on his path by straying from his path, and if I've strayed from mine by staying on mine.

When I got home, Em was back from work, and I told them everything about my dinner with Jawn.

- Will