Dispatch 5/10/23

A few updates

Friends,

In the past couple months my posts have gotten somewhat more infrequent as I’ve started working on longer narrative “novelistic” pieces. I think these show a greater perfection of my craft and tell the story I intend to tell much better than the weekly or biweekly “party reports” that they grew out of. Still, I feel some ambient pressure from this medium itself to give you all some updates in between those bigger installments. So I have a bunch of competing obligations to Substack subscribers, my day job that pays the bills, my medium-term goal of organizing all this work into a viable book, and in between those things I have to find some time for the two forms of leisure that the writing itself needs to stay interesting—that is, the social leisure (going out and seeing “what’s going on in New York”) and the free intellectual pursuits (reading whatever books I want to read that aren’t necessarily associated with what I’m working on at the moment). I’m not complaining or making excuses, life is great, I’m just saying that I’m busy and I need more Adderall.

Tai Lee, who’s become a sort of shadow author of the latest pieces (she’s like the primary influence on all these Valerie-Solanas–type ideations of aestheticized violence, for one), is spending May on the west coast. She’s back home in LA now and then she’ll be in Canada for a bit, where she’ll be on some remote island where they don’t have wifi. She’ll be back at the beginning of June, and then we’re both planning to spend August in LA with some other friends, the idea being to just post up in some East LA bungalow and let all the Hollywood rejects and yoga cultists and washed-up indie darlings come see the great New York writers.

In the meantime I’m working on some stuff that requires a bit more research than just going to parties on acid and letting the city’s vainest theater kids run their mouths at me.

A bunch of visionless downtown fascist loser socialites were celebrating the murder of the “degenerate” “vagrant” Jordan Neely on the F train (literally the Dimes Square train) the other week, the most naked expression of their class affinity for white supremacist violence since their last collective self-immolating Nazi freakout. Their celebration was predictably couched in some pseudo-feminist notions of white female victimhood and whatnot, an attitude echoed by some of the reactionary radfems that Tai is always beefing with. They admire the big strong white “heroes” who are ready and willing to just strangle the life out of the Black men whose bodies they have to step over on their way to yucking it up at whatever shitty gallery opening or TikTok meme video film screening they’re going to. These people would’ve felt the same about Emmett Till, and that’s really all there is to say about them. It’s just another contemporary expression of the same old KKK shit. Why should everyone care about this… this criminal when the real injustice is that I’m not famous enough??? But this sentiment has become mainstream—they’ve got the mayor and the governor on their side, even much of the media, and then of course Elon Musk and all his bluecheck gimps…

Speaking of Elon Musk, as I’m writing this right now the bigbrain science genius has just tweeted a picture of a Milady (aka “Cutiepie”) NFT—a real King Midas endorsement…

More soon,

Mike