1. I was in a photo-shoot for a magazine called Nylon. The location of the shoot was an elementary school that happened to be The Brooklyn Free School. Have you heard of this place? It’s a school where the children make the rules, democratically. They vote on everything. You can listen to a pretty fascinating radio story about it here. The shoot had nothing to do with the school, it was chosen for it’s light and timeless look. But as I posed in pretty clothes and make-up I was of course also trying to take my own pictures of this messy, wild place that kind of vibrated with a lack of standardization.

These are notes from a meeting I should have had a loooong time ago.

The start of a poem that will be finished later? With extra yellow paper because the writer is sure it will be quite long? I already like it.

I tried to take this of myself in the Art Room. Paint all over the walls, a fucked up cardboard fort, it was the most hectic of the rooms, and of course all the art was ridiculously excellent like look out Whitney Biennial.

Thank you to Seth for hanging out with us while we put ourselves through our funny paces.

2. Another thing that happened was that I was the first person to ever feel exhausted and bereft in NY while wandering the streets waiting for a meeting. It was pretty shocking, a lot of people stared at me and my lack of direction or haste. I checked my email on my phone so many times that my phone was finally like WHAT. Then I saw this wall. You would. You would find a way to create a miniature crisis in exactly 45 minutes. You would then sit on the curb and ask yourself what is actually wrong and the truth would come tumbling out like hidden bagels. You would go get some lemonade pretending that you are your own child. And you would arrive at the meeting feeling much better, shaking hands and making the gestures and noises of a completely casual person, even showing them the picture on your phone of the wall, just for fun. You would.

3. I went to MOMA with MM and had a pretty ecstatic time with the Francis Alys show and a Thomas Hirschhorn piece. I also looked at this book, The Brown Sisters, in the bookstore. It’s just one photo a year of these four sisters, starting when they’re teens and twenties in 1975 all the way through 2005. By the end I was doing that thing where you look at the ceiling to make all your tears go back in your head. They are very pretty sisters, prettier than most of us, but I’m not going to tell you I was moved because they were so beautiful when they got older. I wasn’t looking at complexity or emotion; I was only focused on physicality. Their skin thickened, their pores got bigger, their brows became furrowed, eyes complicated with wrinkles. I think I was crying because the images were so unfamiliar to me. The thing that should be the MOST familiar thing in the entire world was nearly shocking. I can’t think of any original way to put this: all day every day I see young women, or old women who look young. Sure, I see my mom and the older people I know, but frankly they’re not marketed to me very well and I’m very impressionable. Whoever wants to make an impression on me pretty much can. What I wished, looking at the ceiling, was that I had known about this from the start. That this book had been handed out in school when I was 17, maybe in flip book form, and that all of us girls had flipped through it again and again until we got it through our heads that this would absolutely happen. Then we might have set out at a different angle, creeping very slowly towards death, together, in some magnificent way.
I’m going to do my best to get started on this now, but honestly it’s a little late in the game so I will need your help.

4. The real reason I came to NY was simply to be a very proud wife. Just one more week til Beginners opens!

Thank you to all the people who made videos of familiar objects coming after them. Such great skittering, sliding, floating, and clunking. I watched them all, with a smile.

Coming Up: The Real Truth About My Co-Star Hamish Linklater.