Notes 5/5/2025

After a hundred days in it feels safe to say that the second Trump administration has killed whatever lingering “reactionary downtown avant-garde” mystique was left in the city. It was always decadent, decaying, on the outs, people were always telling me to quit, which I had ignored because I felt there were more depths of delusion to explore. When I started writing this New York stuff in the spring of 2022, the glut of other Dimes Square thinkpieces already meant the whole thing was overexposed. The real heads had been hanging out at China Chalet before that place closed, whenever that happened, and me and the whole Crumps generation was already late to the real party. But even in that belated hour in Spring 2022 there was another Gatsbyesque rager thrown by some shadowy patron every other day, and the whole thing was cursed, but it was also lit. These events drew the attention of a wide range of New York types—the “NYC media world,” which I think has always been my real subject of interest. There were a lot of people trying to interpret what it all meant, since it supposedly meant something about the future. And in this vortex was cast of characters I found interesting, essentially all the people who always went to the poetry readings at Beckett’s and then later at Sovereign House. Some of my fascination was the novelty of this strange ideological zone and some of it was simply my own personal obsession with the simple idea that there’s a place in the world where all these people pretend to be poets. Over 2023 and 2024 the novelty faded, but there was still the idea that this world signified something about what was coming—especially Sovereign House. The most savvy operators got out in late 2022 or early 2023 and have successfully rebranded and washed their hands of their past reactionary flirtations. During those years the social groups that comprised the central cast of “Crumpstack characters” gradually fragmented, as all scenes do, I’m told. People had breakups and awakenings and renunciations of this and that—and usually for the best. The different characters went in different directions, and their respective worlds started getting a bit smaller, at least relative to the demands of this grand microcosmic “scene vision” that imagined itself as the setting for the next great American novel. By the summer of 2024, what was left going on that attracted media attention was already a parody of a parody. But there was still the morbid anticipation for what could happen if Trump returned to power. That, along with some crypto money, was what kept people going at Sovereign House long enough to see through Trump’s final victory. And then at the New York Young Republican Gala, which in a particularly surreal moment felt like a weird graduation, or a funeral. Everything was turning into a funeral. And then the fascists returned to power—and once that happened, suddenly there’s not much more that the downtown kids can add. I mean, with the White House posting all its demented AI-generated genocide slopaganda right on main, there’s hardly any need for a class of “based” artists to do the regime’s work for it. Poetry reading series keep getting cancelled because the hosts can’t stop inviting people who do racist slur poems and then the bars kick them all out. The crypto gravy train also suddenly stopped, with the Solana memecoin ecosystem collapsed by a series of rugpulls straight from the top. It’s like they all got out-signified by the posting master, the irresistible black hole of fascist enjoyment. The self-styled vanguard no longer means anything. Who could’ve seen this coming? Everyone goes their separate ways. Some of the more conscientious people are vaguely ashamed. The crypto whales are somewhat poorer. But for the most part, no one really learns anything.

***

A bunch of people live in Flatbush now, myself included… there’s an alley behind Cassidy’s pad on Nostrand with the single park bench that is both the stage and the house of “Alley Theater”… I was there the night of the party for that guy who faked going to prison for his Palestine activism, for stealing a couple Zionist yard signs in suburban Connecticut… I was in someone’s room finishing someone’s bag with Cassidy and a bunch of people were saying that they were going to the prisoner’s party in Bushwick, and then a bunch of others were saying that they were going out back to do more Alley Theater, and then someone else said that their dealer was on the way and they couldn’t go anywhere… I said I’m not going to the prisoner’s party, even though the proceeds from the event would supposedly go to Gaza. Other party reporters were already on the case. Padrote Drogrado messaged me from Mexico City asking about it, girls in London asking about it, the people of the world want to know about the hot new internet event… In any case, I was already close enough to home, I didn’t want to get stuck out in Bushwick… “To the Alley! Alley Theater forever!” They said it like they meant it… So we went downstairs to the alley, maybe like a dozen people… There’s a bunch of new people in that crew now who I don’t really know, it’s hard to keep up… The kids started doing an improv skit about Israel and Palestine, at least that’s what it was supposed to be, they started yelling at each other incoherently, and a couple people were filming it on their phones, these were the directors, “more surreal” they demanded, more non-sequiturs, more noise, but they were also half-acting themselves, and they were filming the audience too, who were also actors… someone was rolling around on the ground… all in all it was a group of people filming themselves screaming in an alley at around 10 o'clock at night… posting it to Instagram… Then Cassidy came back, I think someone must’ve picked up, “Shut the fuck up!!! Do you need to be this loud?”… The Alley Theater show ended abruptly, and we never learned what came of Israel and Palestine… Half the crew hopped in a big van someone owns and went to the party in Bushwick… I stayed with Cassidy and Peter and Bienstock and Chloe and this dude Anthony I’d sometimes see at Sovereign House who says he’s a founding stock American and always asks me how far my patrilineal ancestry goes back, and I tell him it goes pretty far back but I’m not sure how far exactly, definitely before 1776, Georgia, or maybe the Carolinas… in the Crisp County Confederate veterans registry you’ll find some Crumplers, which is the same family … “the Confederate veterans registry is nothing, Continental Army registers are where it’s at”… I was talking about life in Virginia when the dude said that he saw Colonel Mosby walking around Chinatown. “You hallucinated Mosby?” I asked, and he said no, he saw the man himself, standing guard, in the flesh, in his gray uniform… Bienstock is a gooner and he’s obsessed with Sophie Rain and the utopianism of the Miami bop house… “Maybe when you’re old Sophie will remember you as her number 1 fan from back in the day and let you hit it,” Peter said. An hour later the van returned from the prisoner party, though the crew had no consensus on what the party was like. Some said it was good and some said it was bad. I figured I’d read about it in the papers anyway… I drank most of two bottles of wine and passed out on the couch… The next time I saw Cassidy she was already being evicted from the Flatbush place… For the moment she had a new arrangement in the West Village, with new adulterous affairs… She was telling me she’s trying to get a job doing social media for some progressive organization, making propaganda for the unions, the right-wing shit is over, not that she was ever loyal to that anyway, and this new thing even paid well…