Nights Without Dreams

A series of trips around East Broadway

I’ve been laying low for the past few months, there hasn’t been as much for me to say that’s felt particularly urgent, and most of my creative energy has been going into a book. The bourgeois countercultures of downtown Manhattan go on as ever, whether or not I write episodic biweekly Substacks about all the latest happenings in the scene. By now Sovereign House has established itself as the main spot for Yarvinist DIY-space nightlife. Occasionally they’ll rent the place out for some random event like a quinceañera or a launch party for The Point magazine, but generally there are two main crowds that converge at Sovereign House. The first is the “political” group, the psyop artists and foreign intelligence assets, the tourist techies and venture capitalists, the flamboyant niche reactionary Twitter posters, the buttoned-up mystics who prophesize about some monarchic or theocratic future for America, and all the other true believers with some real investment in the so-called Dimes Square ideology that they want to convert into cultural capital. The other is the “hipster” group, the grungier edgy club kids who worship clout and notoriety and make alt-lit, alt-film, alt-theater, alt-music, alt-whatever and see the scene as a career accelerator. Depending on the night you’ll find more of one group than the other, and they both need each other for the illusion to be sufficiently dangerous and seductive. Without the hipsters, the politicos just babble conspiratorial nonsense; without the politicos, the hipsters just take pictures of themselves. Personally, I am popular with the hipsters and tolerated by the politicos. Nick Allen and the guys who run the place are cordial to me in such a way that it seems like I’m in on the whole joke, which, maybe I am. Either way, it’s a trip, and I feel like it’s time to share some of these latest journeys into the night.