An Innocent Heartland Weirdo

Anti-circumcision activists, captatores, Ridgewood nationalists

Patrick is visiting from Chicago. The last time I hung out with him here we met the Bone Crusher. We meet at 169 and catch up for a bit before stopping by Sovereign House. Tonight they’ve got an anti-circumcision activist named Ron Low headlining, and he’s going to show us a slideshow about his 20 years of “intactivism” and the TLC Tugger, the device he’s invented to restore foreskins. Like Patrick, Ron is visiting from Chicago. The Sovereign House crowd is mostly young hipsters that are there for the opening musical act, and a bunch of them clear out once that’s over. Throughout his “avant garde musical foreskin restoration lecture,” Ron performs a bunch of songs he’s written about the dangers of circumcision, including one set to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” Ron is a short man with white hair and he’s wearing a jock strap and a T-shirt that says “Foreskin feels REALLY good!” He shows the crowd pictures of the times that people have recognized him and asked to take selfies during the World Naked Bike Ride in Chicago. His presentation is free of antisemitic or otherwise racist innuendos (I think the one mention of Jewish circumcision is pointing out that Michelangelo depicts the Biblical figure David with his foreskin intact). An innocent, heartland weirdo who retweets President Biden and seems to have resisted the temptations of hitching his cause to the right-wing manosphere. Patrick says that in Chicago people will just post up somewhere and start a regular DJ night and just keep at it for decades, and that the city doesn’t really have the same sense of constant churn and searching for the next big thing and social climbing to the next rung of prestige and relevance that characterizes New York, or at least “downtown.” This might be more wholesome and lend itself toward communities held together by earnest oldheads, but it also leads to widespread “Pitchforkcore” taste, everyone’s into shit that was big five years ago. I think at some point Ron is supposed to show everyone his cock, but I don’t really pay too much attention and Patrick and I spend most of our time outside smoking spliffs Patrick rolls in his tiny-cigarette style and talking about other stuff, about our writings, about how he spent six weeks in London digging through material at the National Archives about the political economy of early modern Britain, and the way that UChicago (he’s three years into a seven-year PhD) and the academic world more generally has blown up in the wake of October 7 and the genocide in Gaza, every day brings more images of the mass murder of the Palestinian people, more sadistic fascist obscenities, and the everyday geopolitical fault lines in the academy between the “revolutionary nationalists” and the “liberal internationalists” visible everywhere you turn, a vicious class and generation conflict between pedantic human supercomputers calculating the death tolls for their preferred scenarios for the collapse of Amerikkkan empire, cope for guilty consciences, pervasive bitterness and rage and nihilism, the colossal inertia of fallen institutions, no one can talk about anything but bringing the war back home, and then into our minds, and then he’s reminding me of a small detail from one of my recent posts, the part when Chicago’s own literary magazine The Point had a party at Sovereign House…

Probably the most common feedback I get to my work, in person and in writing, is something to the extent of “you should admit to your personal enjoyment in writing all this.” And, well, true enough. What’s not to love about watching cartoonishly despicable people debasing themselves at open mic nights? In other cities they would just be curiosities, just freaks and perverts hanging out, but in New York, the world-city, the fate of civilization is supposedly at stake. There’s gravitas here, when the schizo who affects Cicero as he’s rambling about masturbation and racial IQ differences and his personal theory of truth and beauty and the cinema and whatever finds that audience of serious-seeming people who agree, or at least flatter his grandiosity. That’s just his bit, after all. And this audience is full of people with big ambitions of “making it” in whatever corner of the culture industry, typically the arts most grounded in playing dress-up and pretend. Fortune even rewards some of these people, enough to rope the other suckers in. (That, or they’ve made it already in some less glamorous commerce and are cashing in their gains for prestige or pussy.) You can’t be denounced as a poser in a scene that celebrates posing above all else. So you have a combination of insecure autodidactic gurus who exalt cruelty and bad taste and think they’re going to be the next Hitler, the usual hustle and bustle of the metropolis, a few talented-yet-myopic artists whose tragic thirst for “mainstream” clout and legibility paradoxically brings them here, and a vast nebula of flattering orbiters who just want party invites gassing them all up to drive off a cliff—a spectacle for all the world to enjoy. A well-worded blog post can turn all the tough talk into a tantrum in an instant. How could anyone witness this and not scribble away with delight? It never gets old. Every week brings another book or play or film or album release or fashion line by another sycophant with nothing to say beyond their insights about stepping out onto the streets of Manhattan and fantasizing about the violent deaths of all the black people they encounter (I mean, is this place really so brutal as to warrant that?), and the whole court of captatores assembles again, under dazzling neon lights, stomachs freshly purged of their dinners at Balthazar and now ready to devour this hot new slop. Bring us more wine—she’ll have the Josh. I wipe the spit of another stylish mademoiselle from my cheek. “How dare you write that filth about my work, have you no humanity?” she snarls, “you’re nothing but a gossip-columnist, a social pornographer.” That’s the sweet life.

Back in New York’s good old days, the epic period, the heroic period, I’m told it was possible to live the artist life as a princely NEET, and that’s when people made real great art even without needing any financial incentives, without flattering patrons or submitting to the indignities of the market. You could squat in a garret with all your friends and explore each other’s bodies and cultivate addictions and then escape to your villa in the countryside from time to time and eventually come out with an irreverent book of poems, and that would be a life well lived. Ridgewood nationalists make it sound like their slower-paced provincial life is the closest equivalent to this, even though they also participate in wage labor. They’ve fled the fascist-elitist gentrification of Manhattan and have preserved something resembling the heroic, virtuous lifestyle, even though they believe it’s doomed, that their world faces the inevitable eradication and extinction that awaits all queer utopias. Sometimes when I talk to Ridgewood and L-Train types (when they come downtown, as it’s been half a year since I’ve been out there), they’ll tell me that I need to stop writing these Manhattan satires, I’ve had my little triumph but now I need to stop using my talents to give the reactionoids the attention they crave, that I need to disengage from that and identify the real site of class struggle—that’s where the real poetry is. Find the site of class struggle, identify the revolutionary subjectivity, make the subtractive intellectual intervention, divide one into two, and return to base for my next orders. That’s what a writer is supposed to do. Simple as. Ask them where to find this and they’ll usually get pretty vague, but I guess that’s what I need to figure out myself. They’ve been working on a big piece for The Drift about their scene for the past two years while they’ve been bartending. They know how important it is for a writer to work with an editor, and they suggest I do the same (my work betrays a sort of State-U vulgarity). But for a different subject. Their scene is liberating desire in all its fluctuating multiplicities, in the streets and on the dancefloor, so I can’t get too close and colonize it with my clout-chasing egotism. The same goes for activist spaces more generally, and anything that’s “underground.” There’s almost nothing I can do for the real movement that isn’t sabotage. On the other hand, my work has been a diversion sucking all the oxygen away from marginalized people, and it’s especially gross and creepy that I continue to do this. They’re not trying to be mean or anything. Though unlikely, it’s possible that there’s some ethical future for me other than exile or suicide. Still, they suggest I check out Woodbine. “Woodbine,” I write down in my little notebook. Got it, maybe I’ll check it out, eventually.