$EGIRL: Part 2/4

Lout Theater

Part 2 of 4. Part 1 is available here.

Back to the night that $EGIRL blew up and the Meg Spectre Spectacular and hanging out with Gasda. We’ve left KGB and we’re now at “Earth,” the new open-format arts space Dean Kissick is opening on Orchard Street. The space is bare. Dean is with Patrick, the editor of the litmag Heavy Traffic, and they’re setting up the lights for the venue’s inaugural event in two days. Chris Kraus is coming from LA to read for it and they’re paying for her hotel. In a few weeks they’ll host a three-day marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. We sit on folding chairs and drink wine. I meet Osvald, a Yale comp lit PhD student from Sweden who met Gasda at one of his plays after reading about it in this Substack. I tell Gasda the story about the previous weekend at Charley’s apartment. I tell the Swede that Gasda and Charley have never met but they feud with each other indirectly through Instagram meme pages and quotations in this Substack. Charley’s latest gripe with Gasda is that a profile in Byline apparently compared Gasda to Artaud. Gasda is nothing like Artaud, which is true but it especially irritates Charley, what an atrocity, what absolute stupidity, what philistinism, the people who are really like Artaud are Charley and Cassidy and the rest of them, the true visionaries of what they call “Clout Theater”… Gasda tells me Charley is like Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, this strange everyman who always seems to be near the center of the action, the fireworks seem to just follow him as he sucks and fucks his way around the city, his hard-ons activate the targeting mechanism for V-2 rockets, on the one hand he’s just some pawn in a conspiracy of forces beyond his control, a comic puppet of Crumps and Cassidy and Gasda and Peter Vack and Sovereign House and so on, on the other he’s not so much an actual person as a fluid assemblage of paranoid delusions and infantile impulses, and we’re really all just playing bit parts in his narrative, of which Charley himself is unaware. I tell Dean that, since the last time I’d seen him, I’ve suffered a deep wound to my ego, I’ve been castrated, and so I’ve now accepted that maybe my writing is simply bourgeois. Gasda and I are now brothers in cucked melancholic liberalism. Dean says he’s disappointed to hear this. He says that he found my revolutionary delusions charming, delusions are beautiful, and that it’s a shame to think that all the characters in “Dimes Square” have the same fate. It’s the same story as Dasha and whatever, she was “Sailor Socialism” once, an icon of that Bernie revolution for a fleeting moment before the act ran its course and the generic disillusionment of failed artists set in. Then we all go to Clandestino. At Clandestino we run into Hannah, a writer I met a few weeks before when she talked to me about this article she’s doing for Dagens Nyheter about downtown scene stuff. I introduce Hannah and Osvald and they talk in Swedish for a bit. Hannah’s mom is a member of the Swedish Academy, the organization that decides the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

***

Gasda: The world has become a giant TV show. Everyone’s life is a potential program.

Crumps: Here on this stage we have access to a unique experiential resource, a byproduct of intensely concentrated desiring flows, which we extract and refine into ideology. We then export this ideology. To our LA friends, this is what’s happening in New York. To the Brits, this is what’s happening in America. To everyone else, this is what’s happening in the English language.

Gasda: The diseases that transformed our orientation toward space and spaciousness. The new metaphysics of space. Of intimacy. Of desire. The death of an eroticism that began in the Baroque period. A transcendent excitement that’s lost when private life becomes something that can be constantly sold back into the public sphere.

Crumps: “Matthew Gasda” only exists when he becomes useful as a vessel for certain ideas about art. Once that’s finished, he returns to being an anonymous apparition in the crowd, a nobody.

Gasda: We are witnessing the disappearance of beautiful eternal structures.

Crumps: If art has no revolutionary impulse, then it’s worthless.

Gasda: At Tourelles, Genet realized he was rejected by his fellow leftist prisoners and esteemed outside the prison by right-wing aesthetes and collaborators. Even at the time of Liberation, he maintained a provocative and ambiguous sympathy with the collaborators and the Germans. Ironically, it was this “Nietzschean” politics—this politics that was more aesthetic than moral, this politics that exalted the freaks and the damned, a proto-incel politics—that led him to the Palestinians, the Black Panthers, and the Red Army Faction.

Crumps: I’m not sure I have much to say about “love.”

Gasda: The world is getting dumber and more illiterate. We’re writing in an age of addictions. We’ve lost something of ourselves. It’s frankly embarrassing.

Crumps: Freud says substitution is healthy. Normal mourning is, like, 1–2 years. After that it starts getting pathological.

Gasda: Soon our writing will be completely illegible.

***

The next week I’m at the Vino Theater in Bushwick to see the latest entry in the Clout Theater mythos, The Play about the Anti-Clout Play. But first, a short genealogy.

First there was the Peter Vack www.RachelOrmont.com movie Crumps humiliation ritual in the summer of 2022, the original clout theater, which was a scenester initiation for myself and a wholesome bonding activity for a bunch of the personalities that comprise the Vack Circle. The following winter, Charley got a bunch of people from the Vack Circle to put on his play, Manero’s. Charley says he was trying to test the concept of “hyperstition of the party” from Angel Emoji’s “Host Manifesto” by staging a fake play at a bar (that is, Manero’s in Little Italy) and making people think it was a “real” play and getting Crumps to write about it and pissing Gasda off. This worked (semi-fictionalized as the Untitled play in “Spring of Narcissus”). The play was supposed to be a rip-off of Fluxus events where they would just sit in bars and do whatever and call it avant-garde. Manero’s had no script, it was all just incoherent improv yelling. Charley said that his ex got really mad because he had gotten all excited that the Manero’s concept was successful, but she thought the product was shit, and she started crying and crashed her car trying to get out of the parking spot outside the bar. Last fall, there was Shae’s Clout Play, described in “Nights without Dreams.” The Clout Play was sort of an actual play in that it had a real script and the actors seemed to be more or less off-book. The Clout Play was also basically a parody of Gasda, or at least Shae et al.’s vision of Gasda, which is mostly just a vision of themselves. And then a few weeks later, there was the Anti-Clout Play, which I did not attend, and that was directed by this guy named Vestigial Cock. Charley believes he came up with the term “anti-clout”—or maybe it came out of conversation with Vestigial Cock, whatever—and he wanted to do an homage to this Fluxus-adjacent art movement called “manifestoism” where they released a bunch of gobbledygook manifestos to make fun of how many movements were releasing manifestos and revising them and releasing new ones. Anyway, from what I can tell, the Anti-Clout Play was sort of like the Clout Play, but more nonsensical and with more animal masks, and it was also a failure, at least in the sense that Vestigial Cock was “kind of angry afterwards.” I’m told that it was a mess and sucked, though it’s a mess I now sort of wish I had seen. And now we have the Play about the Anti-Clout Play.  

Before the show starts I’m sitting in the house and watching Charley and Peter Vack and Cassidy and Page and Stephen and Riska and Kathy and Adeline and Chris, they’re all wandering around the stage, blabbing about how this play is going to suck, how they’ve hardly rehearsed after this weekend of new-money debauchery, belching the gas from their White Claw Surges and hitting their vape pens. They’re almost out of White Claws but I manage to get one of the last ones. The small theater is packed with familiar scenesters. The play is about to start. Actually, no, there will be a series of readings before the plays. The readings are the standard edgy fare, ruminations on the pleasures of slur-saying and the like. Then there’s an intermission. I go outside and smoke. Adrian is wearing a fresh new leather motorcycle jacket with a snakeskin lapel and he tells me about the latest fluctuations in the value of $EGIRL. When we go back inside our seats are taken. I stand next to Adrian. The play finally starts. The actors read off their phones and yell incoherently at each other. They are all supposed to be playing each other—Charley is playing Cassidy and Cassidy is playing Charley, but I can’t really tell who the others are supposed to be. The plot is inscrutable, even with my encyclopedic knowledge of Clout Theater. Peter hits his vape pen ferociously and the action of the play seems to spontaneously orbit his strange, unhinged whims. He is the clear center of attention. At any given moment he could hijack the play and drive it into a realm of total insanity, and the others would have no choice but to go along with it. Perhaps he’s even doing that right now, it’s impossible to tell. Adrian and I manage to get seats when about a quarter of the audience gets up and leaves within the first few minutes. On stage, Charley tells Peter that he’s doing a bad job and says that his sister Betsey should come up on stage because she’s a better actor, and Peter agrees, what a swell idea, and he starts yelling at his sister in the audience, urging her to come up on stage, but she refuses. They go back and forth, Charley hands her a phone with the play’s script on it, but she doesn’t budge and the play moves on. Charley punches Cassidy right in the chest in what looks like a failed attempt at stage combat, “oh shit, sorry.” Charley starts rambling about Matthew Donovan, a relatively new villain in their self-referential “cinematic universe” because of his leftist stances and occasional Instagram stories questioning the intellectual significance of clout theater. Peter asks, “Is Crumps in the audience? Mike Crumplar? Let’s bring Crumps up on stage. Where is he? Let’s get Crumps up here.” I don’t say anything and then they move on. Someone pours a beer over Peter’s head. The actors keep reading off their phones, “we can skip this scene… oh yeah, this one we don’t need to do, we can skip this…” And soon the play is over.

To be continued