Dispatch 2/8/23: Grace

A short tour of a Bed-Stuy house party rager with Tai

I hit up Tai when I saw that the Ion Pack party for the release of The Life’s (ie. Curtis’ band) single “Grace” was going to be at this mansion in Bed-Stuy close by where she lives. She’s been a great wingman for these things lately. I’m at her place on Fulton and she’s telling me about the drama in the transnational feminist anti-imperialist Philippine diaspora organization she’s involved with and how it’s probably going to have this schism because the national leaders are literally in bed with abuser imperialists. She’s got books stacked and scattered around the apartment because she only has one bookshelf and it shakes a little bit as the subways rumble on below. I notice Mao, Andrea Dworkin, some books about Artaud, a trio of Semiotext(e) editions: Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism, Sergio González Rodríguez’s The Femicide Machine, and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Cassidy was there the first time I ever came to Tai’s place because they’re collaborating on this musical project in which the composition is generated based on the outcome of a board game played by the musicians in front of the audience. Tai knows Cassidy from before Dimes Square and Gasda’s theater, and she’s always telling Cassidy to stop being such a dumb waifish reactionary e-girl because she knows Cassidy is smart and that the whole act is fake. “I might be reactionary on the outside, but I’m a true anarchist at heart, whereas you’re an anarchist-communist-maoist-whatever on the outside, but you’ve got this reactionary interiority,” Cassidy told Tai as I watched them flesh out the rules for their avant-garde musical game. It was a perceptive observation. Beneath the chaotic orange-haired butch drummer exterior is someone with an almost Kantian fixation on rules and punctuality, and that fixation frames how she approaches making art. Cassidy isn’t at Tai’s place tonight, but we run into her later.