Hanging out with the Theater Cult of Paglia

Adult Film NYC, the young playwright Roman D'Ambrosio, meeting Dean Kissick for the first time, and a meeting with Caveh Zahedi

Last weekend I saw the Adult Film theater collective put on readings of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Roman D’Ambrosio’s new play Chinatown Cigarettes. That whole crew is the “Theater Cult of Paglia” of my headline basically, though I don’t mean that to be overly sensational, it wasn’t like I witnessed this “cult” in its phase of total Führerbunker self-destruction psychosis—just the ordinary Saturday night ritual of dramatic veneration, a bunch of actors putting on some laid-back off-off-off-Broadway theater, with everything going according to plan. And Adult Film is one posse among several that do this sort of thing regularly. But these people fucking love Camille Paglia, more so than all the others—she’s their ideological-aesthetic north star. The other cults have other gods. But “downtown” generally really likes Paglia because she’s one of the most articulate voices of an anti-feminism that’s still sophisticated and media savvy—she’s reactionary but reactionary in a sexy, cool way, she’s clever and literate, she’s not a prude or a philistine. Maybe she’s middlebrow but that’s the price you have to pay for being iconic. She basically offers an intellectual defense of the fashion and entertainment industries by naturalizing gender hierarchy—and various so-called sexist injustices, pornography for instance, are actually worth defending precisely because they are erotic. For all these beautiful actor-model-filmmaker types, it’s a seductive philosophy that gives meaning to all the psycho shit that they have to put up with as they abuse and are abused by each other in front of cameras, or a live audience, or both. They see it as a bulwark against a banal social realism that’s ubiquitous in “institutional theater.” What’s at stake is the governance of pleasure. Showbiz! So, the Adult Film gang especially digs this idea of a dangerous art—and of course, it’s in the name.

Adult Film is always putting on these plays and film screenings where you’re sure to see many of the same characters I write about in this Substack. Whatever small ad-hoc theater spaces these events take place in are sure to be crowded—and with a group more attractive and gender-balanced than, say, the strictly Urbit tech-and-VC crowd (even though they all cross paths in the big spaces where the whole “downtown fascist scene” comes together). The head honcho of Adult Film is this actor Ryan Czerwonko, and my closest “source” is this other actor George Olesky, who I first met when I saw him act in Matt Gasda’s play Minotaur, and beyond that it’s a nebula of bohemians who do acting workshops, not really worth trying to map out everyone in the inner circle or whatever internal hierarchy it has. But my initial point of access to them is through this dude Roman D’Ambrosio, a young playwright I encountered early in my time in New York…

How I met this dude Roman

I met Roman the first time I ever went to Clandestino, which was also the first time I met Dean Kissick. This was back this past winter, in February or so, when Dean was doing a reading at a loft on Canal Street—where the Shanzhai Lyric artists lived, I think, with the misspelled messages on the fake designer goods that the duo sold in a pop-up storefront on the street below. Dean read a hallucinatory column he wrote for Spike Art Magazine and the Shanzhai Lyric girls talked about their poetic garments and some other guy had a powerpoint presentation satirizing activism and calling for furniture to be abolished. None of those people knew who “Crumps” was back then, except for Dean, a bridge between the weird internet and the brick-and-mortar New York scene, who knew me as the “incel theorist” Twitter personality. Dean and I talked a bit and then he suggested we go to Clandestino. As we walked down Canal Street someone from the Drunken Canal recognized Dean and gave us issues of the neighborhood paper fresh off the press. Over the intersection of Canal Street and the Bowery there was a billboard with a beautiful woman on it that read: “MALE ENHANCEMENT MATTERS,” and Dean said that it was quite a lovely billboard. Dean’s British, by the way, he’s got a British accent, a detail that gets forgotten but always seems to surprise people who only know him in writing. And then Dean was recognized at Clando, by the bouncer and the bartenders and then this guy Alex Shulan who runs the Lomex Gallery, also on Canal Street, and who sat with us a bit. Dean and Alex talked about the H.R. Giger exhibit that was running at the Lomex Gallery at the time. That was when we met Roman, who just happened to be sitting at the table next to ours in packed Clando, holding an issue of the art magazine from the event we were just at. Yes, that’s what it was—it had been the launch party for some magazine, the first of many magazines and other trendy niche documents I’d gather from chasing Dean around Manhattan in search of this Yankee-Bolaño world. This one was glossy and more-or-less apolitical, and I remember paying 20 bucks for it. Roman asked Dean for an autograph and Dean signed the title page of Roman’s copy, and then I insisted on signing it too, “@mcrumps on twitter.” Roman wasn’t on Twitter but the friend he was with, Scott, a writer and associate of Expat Press who runs a blog called Café Violenza, recognized the handle. He said something like “so you’re that Crumps cuck,” but he walked it back pretty quickly. It didn’t really fit the tone of the conversation, especially around diplomatic Dean. I took no offense, I was flattered by the notoriety and it revealed a bit about himself, that he was Vincent-Gallo–pilled or whatever, which was a valuable bit of intel in mapping out the social terrain. Roman, by contrast, had a totally wide-eyed innocent midwestern demeanor, tall and handsome with teddybearlike features that look friendly and reassuring. He told us about how he’s a playwright who is going to be the next Tennessee Williams, that he was going to revolutionize American theater, make it “real” again for the ordinary American, and he said it with the confidence that could only come from a dude in his early twenties. He invited us to see a reading of his first play.

The next time I saw Dean I was already well into stirring shit around town, and pretty much everywhere I’d see Roman too. Roman was playing the game in his own way, which meant being cool with the Adult Film people and getting them perform his plays. So far, I’ve seen two of Roman’s plays: his first one, Bobcat about an aspiring writer who is held back by and cheats on his nagging wife, and Chinatown Cigarettes. But he’s also written a play about fraternities called Homemade Dynamite, and a one-act play called 3 Lesbians Smoking Outside an Art Gallery, and then according to Instagram yet another one called Reunion. These are just the ones I know about, there might be more. Bobcat was written before Roman got to New York, which is evident in how the characters talk about what it means to be a writer and part of the whole New York literary world, and by the time he gets to Chinatown Cigarettes you can tell that the Dimes Square has entered the body. I’ll get back to that in a bit…

Rooftop, LES, July

Earlier this summer I went to another Adult Film event that took place the weekend before filming the Peter Vack movie, the rooftop “Red Hot Summer Screenings.” Matthew Spencer, a Twitter friend from the west coast I wanted to meet, was in town and I texted him asking if he wanted to go to this typical downtown scene reactionary art people movie screening in the Lower East Side, and he was like “lol sure,” so we agreed to meet there, but I had texted him pretty late in the day about it and getting there on time from Brooklyn was impossible. We got there halfway through the opening one-act solo performance by George Olesky (this was a live performance and the rest were movies), so the guy who was working the door of this building let us and some other stragglers in to hang out in this apartment until George’s performance finished, and then he’d let us on the rooftop to see all the rest. Inside, a copy of Sexual Personae conspicuously rested on the coffee table. The guy told us he worked at an optometrist’s office and that the police had showed up at the apartment because they aren’t actually supposed to be doing these events on the roof anymore, and that there would be snitches watching from neighboring buildings to call the cops if they saw people drinking alcohol. As we waited in the apartment Matthew told me about translating Kleist and I told him I was supposed to be hanging out with Dasha the next day. This piqued the interest of the other girls who were waiting with us in the apartment. “Which Dasha?” they asked, but we all knew that I could mean only one. (The meeting with Dasha—which unfortunately I can’t really say more about without like, actually doxing her regular whereabouts—didn’t end up happening, she gave me a four-hour window of time she’d be at the place and was gone by the time I arrived two hours in. I ended up meeting her at the www.RachelOrmont.com filming days later.)

Once we got to the rooftop, there were some people drinking alcohol, but they tried to do so discreetly, opening cans so slowly and deliberately that it drew the noise out and paradoxically seemed to make it louder. The first short we saw was Glennda and Camille Do Fashion Avenue, in which Camille Paglia joins drag queen Glennda Orgasm in a tour of New York’s fashion district where they talk about how contemporary mainstream feminism (this was filmed in the early 90s) threatens to take away all the wonderful erotic things the fashion industry has to offer, like fur coats, things that are made right here in New York City. Among the other shorts were A.C. Peer’s Poolside, “a summertime noir featuring Lizzy Grant aka Lana Del Rey in a pre–Born to Die acting turn” and Sam Stillman’s The Little Prince of New York, also a noir shown through the eyes of young people (noir is popular). Naturally, I saw Roman there, and he told me about a film crew there that was filming for some documentary about the downtown scene, or something like that. The crowd here more or less looked the part, like hipsters, photogenic, not the sort of mythic punk coarseness but the indie sleaze greasiness that points to a cultural moment in more recent memory, its reactionary-nostalgic quality easier to grasp, its horny neuroticism bubbling just beneath the surface. Anyway, there wasn’t like such an enormous gap between the idea these people have of themselves and their literal physical appearances, which is good for them.

Last Saturday

Anyway, this past Saturday I went to Greenpoint for the latest Adult Film event, play readings of Fassbinder’s Petra von Kant and Roman’s Chinatown Cigarettes. Since the readings are such informal performances where everyone’s still on-script and a narrator reads out the stage directions, it’s kind of pointless to critique the acting or staging, which is fortunate because that’s the thing I’m absolutely least interested in doing. I do like the alienated-amateurish quality of a “reading.” But someone like Gasda disagrees, I think, he doesn’t like doing readings, but getting everyone off-script is so much work that you have to charge way more for tickets and then you also start facing all the hassles of running a so-called “real” theater, which I guess is to say, a theater run by someone who must operate like a shrewd bourgeois.

The evening started with Petra von Kant, which was especially interesting not only because it is one of Paglia’s favorite films but also because they did it with an all-male cast. Considering the informality of the one-off performance, the commitment to this choice is obviously far less than if they filmed a whole ass movie version of it, but doing this play about narcissistic women who crave their own repression with an all-male cast in such an outpost of Dimes Square just has too much potential unconscious ideological significance to go unmentioned. Still, there’s also a very recent gender-flipped version of the Fassbinder play by the French director François Ozon, Peter von Kant, which I haven’t seen, so the choice isn’t exactly unprecedented.

In the intermission between Petra von Kant and Chinatown Cigarettes they played some short films, but I missed those because I was outside. Betsey Brown rolled up in a taxi as I was talking to one of her friends, and I said hi to her but there wasn’t much more conversation than that. This was the first time I’d seen her or Peter since filming their movie, though I’d already seen the Ion Pack guys when I went to their Baby’s All Right marathon screening of Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show. The Ion Pack guys were very cordial, they’re cool operators, they’re sort of like Dean in that they function to connect the various eccentric characters in this narrative, and I was introduced to that piece of work Caveh himself. He’s another cult figure, a more self-destructive one than the Paglians seem to be. I asked him about Brecht. I had actually been working on a Substack piece about Caveh’s films that uses that event as a launching point, but there’s so fucking much to say about Caveh, his place in “the scene,” and the relation of my own work to his antagonistic sprawling reality-TV metafictions, that it’s gotten a bit out of hand. Everywhere I go I mention it to people and they ask me if I’ve seen this or that relevant influence on Caveh’s work, I’m always like “ok, I’ll check it out,” and the list of things I have to check out before I can finish the Caveh piece just keeps getting longer. After this Adult Film event I now have to check out some Iranian documentary filmmakers, and who knows what it’ll be next time. Probably some of the many women who have fallen out of his circle and are suing him for various reasons.

Then there was Chinatown Cigarettes. I had asked Roman during the intermission if his play was going to be “edgy,” and he seemed taken aback for a second, like he was mentally calculating whether “edgy” meant here whatever kind of stuff I would immediately have him cancelled for, as the woke critic. And I realized my question could have that meaning as soon as I said it, but I really didn’t mean it as some trick, and the whole reason I’m hanging out with these people is that I’m intrigued by their promises of edginess and all that. Edgy is better than boring. His response was pretty funny though, he said something like “Uhh, no… well, there are two big–age-gap relationships in it…” And then it turned out that wasn’t even the main “edgy” (“cancellable”) thing in the play! That honor goes to the titular cigarettes themselves. I can’t remember the whole plot of the show off the top of my head right now but there’s this Dimes Square twink dude who lives in Chinatown and works at this nearby gay bar called Manosphere, which is owned by this lecherous and exploitative bear daddy (hilariously played by this guy Theodore Bouloukos, definitely one of the highlights), there’s this Dasha archetype character played by Cassidy O’Grady who also played the Dasha archetype in Gasda’s Dimes Square, there are a bunch of other people who try to seduce each other and it’s all lubricated by the narcotic-aphrodisiac properties of the mysterious cursed Chinese cigarettes that drive the plot forward. Afterwards I was hanging out with Roman and some others at the bar Oak & Iron, and Roman was like, “Crumps is probably going to call this orientalist”—hey, he said it, not me! It was interesting because it’s basically the opposite framing of the Dimes Square scene’s relationship to Chinatown’s working-class immigrant population as you see in, for example, the Will Harrison “Escape from Dimes Square” piece in The Baffler. If the “leftist” position is to emphasize how the scenesters are a bunch of gentrifying colonizer parasites, the “rightist” response would be that those working-class Chinese immigrants are actually corrupting us, with their opium dens and their Maoist ideology...

During that conversation at Oak & Iron I brought up Cassidy’s character, the Dasha archetype, and Roman said that the character had actually been written for Dasha herself, which, of course it was. Apparently Dasha said she was interested in doing it, but maybe she says a lot of things. She was supposed to be in Gasda’s Minotaur and then bigger things came up (Cassidy replaced her), and the same for Caveh Zahedi’s show (Betsey Brown replaced her). All these cruel men keep writing roles for Dasha and then poor Cassidy has to play the part over and over again, in Gasda’s plays and now Roman’s. This is how they practice the craft of expressing sexual tension. They should just let Cassidy write the plays instead. And then you’ll see Dasha’s likeness on various objects, in a quasi-religious diptych in the Public Access gallery, on acid tabs… The archetype is certainly a cliché by this point, at least as the ditzy femme fatale that the men write, that’s the false form, she’s more real in her absence, everywhere but never actually arriving…