The De Vere Ball

Among the reactionary propagandists, washed-up indie rockers, mysterious Frogtwitter anons, and more

Dasha said she was going to punch me closed-fist the next time she saw me after I had made fun of her and her gimps on Twitter for going after Jane Schoenbrun, who they were saying was responsible for getting the screening of Betsey Brown’s Actors cancelled in Chicago. I asked Dasha if she was planning to go to the De Vere Winter Ball, since I knew that the organizers were real keen on pulling in all the notorious scene personalities they could get. It would be one of the more ideal spaces for her to escalate her dispute with me to the realm of physical violence. She said she wasn’t sure and that she didn’t like to go to places where she was expected to be, but that I should stay vigilant because she put the fatwa on me.

My point of contact for the De Vere Ball, the person who first told me I was on “the list,” is this filmmaker named Ryan Lambert. Ryan is a tall icy-looking Aryan who I always see dressed in these flamboyantly colorful hippie fits that tell you he’s been living in LA for a while, even though I think he’s originally from Georgia. He doesn’t carry a phone around New York and he’s got a bunch of funny dadlike speech mannerisms that come out in the way he says things like “let’s circle back around.” I’ve hung out with him at a bunch of events that have gotten Substack writeups, usually the things that take place at Beckett’s, which was where we saw the last Oxfordian spectacle—Curtis Yarvin debating the Shakespeare authorship controversy with Matt Gasda. For some reason I initially thought that his invite was just something he heard through the grapevine, like “I just randomly heard the De Vere people want you to be there,” and it’s only when I ask him to clarify his professional connection to the party that he reminds me he’s also a “paid propagandist for transgressive women,” which includes arranging the publicity for Alex Lee Moyer during the release of Alex’s War and handling communications for Phoebe Nir.

Phoebe Nir is a filmmaker and writer, and she—not Curtis Yarvin—is the true center of the whole New York De Vere crew. Phoebe seems to be a somewhat more serious true believer in the Oxfordian cause, or at least her case doesn’t involve speculating that the real Shakespeare was Edward De Vere’s rentboy. When I meet her she’s friendly and earnest—an eccentric socialite with a sincere passion project rather than a psyop hyperstition artist. Still, it’s a passion project that courts the psyop hyperstition artists. What she and Yarvin and plenty of others share is the idea that New York’s downtown scene could be a vehicle for some eccentric new right-wing bourgeois salon counterculture—and I guess the aristocratic whimsy of the whole De Vere thing is as good a pretext as any other.

The De Vere Winter Ball is at the same place in the West Village as the one in the summer, which I didn’t attend because it was too soon after the big struggle session everyone was talking about and I needed to lay low for a bit. I pull up with my friend Enrico, who I met at the Dean Kissick/Manhattan Art Review guy “Seaport Talk” at TJ Byrnes two nights before. Enrico is a filmmaker from Venice, Italy, and he has the same outsider’s mixture of horror and fascination toward this strange world (which he’s mostly just read about online in things written by people like Dean and myself) as most of the other left-leaning European intellectuals I come across in New York. Like me, Enrico starts his exploration of the downtown scene by finding out whatever Dean is up to. “So tell me,” Enrico says over drinks at TJ Byrnes, “just how serious are all these people?” I tell him to come see for himself, there’s a suitably weird event coming up that’s sold out but I can probably get him in, and that’s how we end up going together. I meet him outside the townhouse and we go inside: a big room with a grand piano and an open bar and a big square spiral staircase that serves as a stage for the performers and leads to a smaller “green room” upstairs with Federal-style furniture. The venue looks more crowded tonight than in the summer photos. We’re dressed appropriately for the usual Dimes Square poetry readings but underdressed for this.

Enrico disappears into the crowd to do his own field research and I tour the party floor. There’s Michael Saltypickles digging his keys in a little baggie, and there’s his roommate Max who I first introduced in the Urbit party piece from last spring. There’s a bunch of the girls from that viral tradcath e-girl meetup picture. There’s Curtis Yarvin with his long guru hair. There’s Ariel Pink milling about by the piano. There’s Tablet deputy literary editor Park MacDougald with Washington Free Beacon reporter Joe Simonson, two characters I know from a past life in Washington, DC. Park edited a review of Alex Lee Moyer’s film TFW NO GF that I wrote for the Washington Examiner. There’s Katherine Dee aka the blogger “Default Friend,” who once dated the former Jacobite editor Rob Mariani, another character from that past life in DC and someone who would be at this sort of thing but isn’t tonight. Somewhere around here is a guy called the Ren Fair Rapist and I don’t know him but people are talking about him. Have you seen the Ren Fair Rapist? And there’s fellow reporter Helen Holmes who covers the scene beat for The Daily Beast and just wrote a piece about this very party (since the Beast ran the story before the party itself happened there’s not much it can say other than that the organizers hope the Red Scare girls show up). Oh, there he is, the Ren Fair Rapist. He just walked by, that’s the Ren Fair Rapist right there. He's bartending. There’s Alex Lee Moyer over there with Ariel Pink. There’s Matt Weinberger and his camera. There’s a podcaster and movie industry guy who flew out from LA for this. There are the Ion Pack guys in their leather jackets. There are some other minor reactionary Twitter personalities. But no Dasha…