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2015 - 2024 by @aangelolanzaa
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Happy Valentine’s Day to @aangelolanzaa who gave me my first and maybe only art show. From 2015 until its closure, @aangelolanzaa hosted dozens of amazing shows @jeffrey.stark, a 
basement window display gallery named after the security guard whose office it once was. 

I didn’t know that I was installing an art show when I showed there; I thought, a space, cool, a bookstore, videos, me. After spending weeks in this basement hawking books, it dawned on me that people use galleries to sell things for real money, and I felt pretty stupid. It was romantic at least. A video I made played on loop during the mall’s open hours. I didn’t have to be there all the time. But I was there, a lot, between Nov 3, 2018 and Feb 14, 2019, wondering what the future of literature could mean if I was down there reading Lost Illusions, which I’d been hired to read alongside someone as a gift from their partner. (Lost Illusions is about an arrogant young beautiful writer who moves to the big city and ends up becoming a shoddy journalist and killing his girlfriend by neglect and all kinds of other things I basically did when I first moved to New York.) Angelo had a nanny cam set up to live-stream the gallery 24/7 on his website. It meant you could go online and see me lolling about which was good for my mental health: it gave me a reason to dress up. I adored the mall kids who would visit me and play on the Big Book @matthilvers made and it was thanks to being there that I got Maggie Lee’s art for the cover of my novel. Also, a stranger found me down there while looking for a bathroom and ended up writing about the encounter in one of my favorite reviews of Mariposa (it’s glowing… he calls me a writer’s writer… maybe I should write again…). We also hosted one of my all-time favorite @hardtoread events in the mall. The dumpling spot in the mall is still open and it’s fire….
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