Rolling Groan Magazine

Astroturf psyops from out west

Nowhere is the decline of the magazines more evident than at Rolling Stone. Forget the Hunter S Thompson era, that’s ancient history, the last banger from them was a decade ago when they accused my older brother’s fraternity at UVA of organized hazing initiation ritual gang rape. I was an undergrad at William and Mary at the time and I remember my girlfriend’s disgust at my initial skepticism of the piece. Even though I knew that fraternities are inherently misogynistic, I thought that the spectacular Sadean cruelty the piece described didn’t fit the banality of my brother and his friends. “Your family doesn’t even like you, how could you choose solidarity with them over the lived experiences of women like me?” Which was reasonable enough, my brother was always the golden child and my parents always compared me unfavorably with him, and I was determined to break out of the petty bourgeois white subjectivity I had been raised in, and I trusted her, and I was outnumbered by all the other people who believed the piece at the time, so I took her word for it. After all, it’s about being faithful to a higher principle. Then, when I got home on Thanksgiving break, my parents asked if I had heard about the Rolling Stone story and what I thought of it. When I said that I thought it could be true, my parents and brother were disgusted. How could I believe such obvious lies over my own blood? It wasn’t long before the piece turned out to be completely false, and my brother’s fraternity got a big defamation payout over it. When I brought it up to my girlfriend later she said that it didn’t matter and that the gang rape story was true in a deeper sense. She is now a respectable film critic in New York, my brother is a respectable accountant at a Big 5 consulting firm, and I write this. In the end I had betrayed myself for nothing, and I’m still a bit bitter at that stupid magazine about it, but whatever. It was an early lesson in the treacherous nature of journalism.

Now when a bunch of dudes with outstanding sexual assault allegations get together Rolling Stone calls it the future of literature, though its reporting is just as credulous as before. “Inside the ‘Anti-Woke’ Literary Scene Growing in L.A.” covers something like the Southern California equivalent of the downtown New York alt-lit scene described in this Substack, focusing on a house party literary salon hosted by the fledgling indie publisher New Ritual Press, which it calls “an act of defiance against ‘wokeness.’” The piece repeats a lot of the right-wing narrative framing about “wokeness,” “cancel culture,” the 2024 election, slogans like “Vibe Shift,” and what the existence of reactionary creatives in “coastal elite” cities signifies. The piece is very flattering to its subjects, presenting their anecdotes about getting critiqued by women in writing workshops and their transformations from 2016-era Bernie bros to Bronze Age Mindset readers and Red Scare listeners as evidence of their bad boy swagger (because nothing says “bad boy” like radicalizing yourself over what women in the MFA program think of you). The writer makes sure to mention that these guys get pussy, in fact he is so impressed with the erudition and masculinity of a dude who wrote a book called Mixtape Hyperborea that he “got the impression he was sleeping with half the girls at the party, though he claims it’s only two.” From the piece it seems like Trump returned to power because Bookforum gave too much attention to women and femmes of color and not enough to these scrappy young men, and that the New York media world harpies really have been conspiring to silence them. Even Dimes Square is too castrated for these guys:

“We need to make literature seem cool,” Rienspects [the Mixtape Hyperborea guy] says. There’s the Dimes Square scene in New York, but that’s all “girls and gays,” he says, referring to the right-leaning reactionary arts scene in Lower East Side Manhattan. “Who’s the male genius who has come out of Dimes Square?”

IF ANYONE HAS THE ABILITY to make literature cool among young men again, it might be Rienspects.

Of the writers mentioned in the piece, Delicious Tacos is the only one who has really established his own reputation and platform (Delicious Tacos was not in attendance at the New Ritual Press party). From what I’ve read, the guy seems to have a relatively non-delusional relationship to his own writing, but he has a really insufferable fan base. I often hear people in the scene praising the guy as the greatest living writer, the transgressive superstar of alt-lit, the lone voice of contemporary literary masculinity, and so on. They talk about him like that Karl Shapiro essay about Henry Miller, which is the introduction to my copy of Tropic of Cancer—he’s Walt Whitman, he’s Rimbaud, he’s in a threesome with D.H. Lawrence and L.F. Celine except unlike those two he’s the “healthy” one, he’s so erudite, he’s actually understating his own virility, he’s accessing cosmic consciousness with his all-American cock, it’s even girthier than you think, fuck fuck fuck, it’s so fucking good!!! But Henry Miller had George Orwell and Ezra Pound and James Joyce and TS Eliot and Aldous Huxley and John Dos Passos and Barney Rosset gassing him up, so you can sort of imagine how the guy must’ve really thought he was God’s gift to humanity. Henry Miller isn’t actually as deep as his defenders had to make it seem in order to beat the obscenity case, and the ridiculous claim that he’s any less “sick” than Lawrence or Celine is too on-the-nose even for an episode of Mad Men, but I guess there’s still the semblance of depth, certainly enough to win me over when I first read Tropic of Cancer in high school. The audience expectations for the depth of Delicious Tacos’ genre of amateur outsider manosphere diaristic blog writing is orders of magnitude lower than that of the midcentury anglosphere literary bohemia. But the guy seems pretty content being the best of his niche class that includes peers like Chateau Heartiste, he doesn’t really seethe about the woke cathedral, he’s an addict who found cult success farting out vulgar musings on his dating life, and he started writing this smut even before the Trump era. Sometimes you can detect a little bit of audience capture, such as in a short hallucinatory blog post he published right after the 2024 election, one small example of weak satire in a generic Frogtwitter sense (soyfacing at the Hitlerian phantasmagoria of the news without really saying anything profound about it), but it also isn’t really what he’s known for anyway. So you can call his stuff misogynistic, but it’s not especially pretentious, which in this particular moment of cultural reaction would be the more damning thing. But he has some really annoying followers and imitators, and if you took their word for it you’d think that Delicious Tacos was the first white man to discover Asian pussy.

In any case, Delicious Tacos is by far the most newsworthy of the people in the Rolling Stone piece. It would certainly be better journalism to just write a profile of him and ignore the rest of the writers, who aren’t significant beyond their modest Twitter followings. I admit that I like reading and writing about these sorts of niche Twitter personalities for sure, but it really needs the proper framing. You have to establish that they are lolcows first and foremost, and only then you can have them occasionally saying things of surprising insight. The hypothetical Delicious Tacos profile would be slightly harder to fit with the usual culture war framing because of his hesitance to hitch himself to the “I’m being silenced by woke” wagon. Also, I wouldn’t want to be the guy to write the profile. To the would-be writer, my advice is that the most appropriate piece would be something like “I Had an MMF Threesome with Delicious Tacos” for VICE, with no pretensions to anything other than sleaze clickbait (which is to say, it’s not that it would be “apolitical,” but rather that it would have the politics of classic VICE, which are exploitative, misogynistic, colonial, fascistic, etc on some level). That’s something I think would titillate both the fags and sluts of Dimes Square and the voyeuristic impulses of the respectable Bookforum and New Yorker crowd, who ultimately aren’t any less cock-worshipping and depraved than the former, which is something you quickly learn once you level up to start fucking them.

Earlier this week Nick Dove called me to talk about his romantic exploits, as usual, and then he asked me if I had read the Rolling Stone piece, which I had. Then he started talking about the New Ritual Press party, as if he was there.

“What are you talking about? We weren’t in LA at that time.” We were in LA in May.

“No, in New York. They paid me to shoot it. You were there, I have pictures of you.”

I realized that it was the one sceney party I had been to in the last couple months, it was only a few weeks ago, though it had barely registered in my memory. It was a poetry reading at Old Flings, which is a cocktail lounge in Alphabet City above the bar Berlin. Old Flings has good cocktails but it’s a terribly cramped venue for readings, and for some reason people keep scheduling them there. I don’t have much to say about that event in particular. It was the night Trump bombed Iran. I only really talked to the people I already knew. Everyone went to Funny Bar afterwards, and I didn’t join them. (Funny Bar is the new scene staple on Essex Street, which I’m broadcasting here to intentionally blow up the spot and annoy the people who like going there.) I had been invited to the New Ritual Press reading on Partiful by Vera PR, which is the boutique PR firm that works with New Ritual Press and some other “cancelled” or “problematic” clients, such as the power pop musician Mo Troper. Vera PR is not the same as the Isaac Simpson WILL PR agency mentioned in the Rolling Stone piece, it seems a slight bit more legitimate (I’m just basing this off a quick glance at their websites and anecdotal evidence from magazine editors saying they’ve gotten promotional emails from Vera, and the fact that Isaac gets into fights on Twitter with the types of characters he’s supposed to be representing), though their clientele overlap. It occurred to me that the Rolling Stone piece itself is probably just PR, like straight-up astroturf. It’s really the only way I can imagine it getting past an editor with any semblance of “journalistic integrity.” One day I hope to have pure Balzac vision on the precise economics of how those sorts of stories are placed in the press. I want to know exactly how much it costs. Rolling Stone is probably pretty cheap, considering how obvious this one was. Same as with Pitchfork, which everyone in music journalism knows. Then I want to find the pimp of The New Yorker and learn the price for a piece in that signature style with those cute little umlauts.