Woah Vicky

An exercise in the fine art of laundering notoriety

So, this one starts with Mitchell Jackson, the publicist who specializes in clients of internet notoriety. Off the top of my head, he represents the reactionary political commentators Candace Owens and Brett Cooper, livestreamer and “looksmaxxer” Clavicular (before Clavicular’s on-camera overdose, at least), hip-hop podcaster and cuckold pornographer Adam22, leftist comedian-podcaster Adam Friedland, writer-influencer-scammer Caroline Calloway, and some others who are pretty juicy but off-the-record.

What do these clients get? A few months ago Clavicular was the subject of a wave of legacy media profiles, dazzled by a boy who hits himself in the face with a hammer to make himself beautiful—essentially Mitch’s doing. Clavicular is weird enough to go viral on his own, but consecrating that virality in the press takes someone like Mitch. He has a sort of neo-Warholian quality; Clavicular would be one of his superstars.

Mitch lives in Florida but he’s often in New York for business, and when he’s here he assembles a little crew to go with him to dinner, musicals, the opera, art galleries, and so on. Sometimes this includes myself. He’s always sure to ask me two things: how the book is coming along, and who I’m dating. Mitch thinks I have terrible taste in women and that I should just date men instead, because they’re less complicated. It’s hard to tell if I’m one of the freaks in his freak show or if I’m one of the architects pulling the strings.

Mitch’s business in New York this time: hosting a poetry reading for his client “Woah Vicky,” a white woman from Atlanta who has surfed the internet attention economy for a decade by saying and doing outrageous things with a blaccent. The event had just been announced online and tickets sold out almost immediately. Repackaging Vicky’s absurdist minstrel tweets as downtown scene poetry to make her more legible to the New York media world—who will inevitably eat it up and shit it out in a series of sympathetic articles and blog posts—this is Mitch’s forte. Most of the influence work I’ve seen Mitch do has been private (sending emails, calling people, inviting people to dinner), and this will be the first time I’ve watched him stage a public happening.

So that’s how I’m at the Met Opera with Mitch a week before Woah Vicky’s reading. We’re seeing Sting’s musical, The Last Ship, featuring Shaggy. Mitch gives me the rundown: this show is Sting’s longtime vanity project about his own childhood, the Met Opera is in a cash crisis because the old generation of donors is dying and the new generation of tech oligarchs have no respect for the arts, the Met was apparently supposed to be getting a ton of money from the Saudis but that deal fell through with the Iran war, so now we’re watching The Police frontman’s own personal Megalopolis about proletarian revolution against Thatcherite austerity in the same house where I saw Tristan und Isolde a few months ago. In other words, this musical would be really bad, and Mitch is the sort of gay man who lives for that shit.

Halfway through the first act Mitch turned to me and said it was the worst thing he had ever seen. It was unclear what Shaggy’s role was the entire time; he sang a few bars in his signature voice and then some in a strange, naked, accentless one. I guess Shaggy will do anything for some cash, I told Mitch, and he said no, Shaggy’s got plenty of money, he’s just best friends with Sting. The guy sitting on the other side of me must’ve been a Sting superfan who knew all the songs to this musical, and he was telling his wife when the best songs were about to come on. “Let’s beat the rush,” Mitch told me right as the show ended, and we slipped out before the applause. He got in a taxi and told me he’d see me next weekend at the Woah Vicky poetry reading—no need to buy a ticket.

Halfway through the week between the Met and the reading, I saw on Twitter a video of Vicky shopping for fake designer handbags on Canal Street with Basil, a flamboyant and vitriolic podcaster we’ve met in the Crumpstack before. Not Gay™, not LGBTQ™, he is instead a “sodomite volcel faggot who occasionally fucks men.” Descended from Afghan royalty, his podcast used to be called “The BareBactrian.” His political theory is structured around the concepts of “sexlectics” and raceplay. Basil’s law: “All bourgeois political kayfabe boils down to projected raceplay fetishes. The degree to which one’s own raceplay fetish is unaddressed is exactly proportional to how openly deranged they are on the timeline.” Basil lives to serve white men, he tells me, and he warns his online audience not to be fooled by the crypto-liberal faggotry of the Thieloid Dimes Square Sovereign House scene. Outflanked from the right by this Muslim homo-Hébertist, that clique despises him in return, but Basil apparently has the ear of Nick Fuentes, who at the moment is perhaps more powerful. I’ve been trying to get an audience with Fuentes through him, but no luck so far.

In the video, Basil and Vicky haggle with Senegalese merchants, who are initially hesitant to appear on camera because of all the fascists who’ve been snooping around there lately filming video content about how Canal Street embodies the multicultural degeneracy of the West (in another context, Basil would be exactly the kind of content creator they should be worried about). They run into an “antifa patriot” who guides them to vendors who are more camera-friendly. Vicky speaks a little Wolof to them as she purchases a handbag. Where the Asians at, Vicky then asks, and then they walk toward the Chinese zone to buy jewelry (“jurry”) and perfume. After buying the goods, Basil and Vicky chat on the street. Basil brings up a Bible verse that Vicky had mentioned on Twitter as one of her favorites—Proverbs 26:11: As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.

Woah Vicky with the bag that Basil (right) bought her. Picture from Basil’s Twitter.

I asked Mitch later what the deal was with the Basil connection. Mitch didn’t know who Basil was; Basil had messaged Vicky about making video content, and Mitch responded saying yeah if you pay up, and Basil said he’d buy Vicky $400 worth of fake designer handbags, and that was a fair deal to all parties involved. As I’m writing this, I see that Mitch has retweeted Basil’s video with the comment “This is a work of cinema.” Anyway…

***

The weather is perfect on the day of the reading, which is happening at the Orchard Street boutique of the menswear brand le PÈRE. There’s a big line around the block. When I get inside I run into playwright Matthew Gasda. Gasda is another guy who is in Mitch’s rotation of scene characters he invites to dinner and the opera when he’s in town. Mitch thinks Gasda also has terrible taste in women. So, I’m not that surprised to see Gasda, but nonetheless it’s an unusual setting—after all, he’s someone who’s always lamenting the downfall of high culture at the hands of slopworld—and I ask him what he’s doing there. He’s helping run the show, as are a bunch of others from his theater company. I get a sense for the precise way that Gasda can be useful to Mitch—as a theater director Gasda has experience running events and access to actors who are always looking for work. In running events, I’m less than useless, but I suppose I offer something else. I ask Gasda what the deal with le PÈRE is, and he’s like, no idea. That’s another department of the Mitch operation.

And how are you going to fit all those people outside into this tiny boutique? We won’t, Gasda says, we sold out at 37 tickets, most of the crowd is press, like yourself. You know that guy Lancelot?, he asks, the guy who came to town like three years ago when the scenesters were inventing this fake cancelled guy named Justin LaPuff and was like, “I’m Justin LaPuff,” and went by that for a while, before getting actually cancelled and retiring the name? Yes, I say, I’m acquainted with the guy. I ran into him at some party the other night, Gasda says, and he seemed to know everything about me, he was well versed in all my lore and whatnot. I had no idea who he was. And he mentioned that he was going to try to sneak into the Woah Vicky reading. I told him that it wouldn’t be a good idea, because I’m running that reading, and there would be a lot of security. And then I saw him here, earlier, at like 4 or 5 pm, and he was pretending to browse the clothes. We asked him to leave, so he did. And then he came back a little later, wearing a strange wig, and he proceeded to pretend to browse the clothes again.

I consider stealing a shirt off one of the racks, but decide against it. A coffee table book might be easier to nab, but I already have too many of those.

As the venue fills up, I get a seat in the back corner, one that doesn’t have a good view of the makeshift stage. Though honestly it probably doesn’t matter, I could probably just use one of the pictures taken by the many photographers floating around here. Unfortunately Nick Dove is off in Maryland at “VibeCamp” this weekend, and I usually get his pictures for free. I’ll figure this out later.

Mitch is the bald bearded man in the center with his hand on Vicky’s shoulder. I took this one.

Once everyone is inside, Vicky’s entrance is announced with the Michael Jackson song “Black or White” playing over the speakers. She’s led by a male lackey who apparently is known online for singing to celebrities their own songs. There are several readers, though only three fit into my narrative sequence: Caroline Calloway, Alex Dmitrov, and Vicky the big star at the very end.

Caroline. Caroline comes on sometime in the middle of the reading with flowers in her hair and a long dark red dress with sleeves that read medieval costume. She starts to introduce the reading she’s about to do, but then there is an interruption. I can’t see it from where I’m sitting, but Vicky is apparently puttering around on the stage behind her. Suddenly the crowd is calling for them to take a selfie together. After they take a selfie, Caroline resumes her preamble. I’m so glad you all could be here, she says, this is like going to church for literature. But I have to leave in a moment. Yes, I have another reading at Bathhouse. So I have to be real quick. This is a one-of-a-kind reading. The takeaway I want you all to have tonight is that Caroline Calloway is smarter than you all thought. Yes! I speak fluent Latin and Greek! And tonight I’ll give you all a real treat, because I love you all! My very own original translation of the work of Sulpicia, the only female poet who wrote elegies in the first person whose works survive to this very day! Perhaps you think I’m lying, that this is fake, a bit—that’s false! This is the official Caroline Calloway translation of Sulpicia, from the original Latin. These poems are very short, and I’m afraid they don’t have a happy ending. Cupid is a cruel, treacherous god, after all. The gods strike us down for our arrogance, for our hubris, of wanting to be loved, of wanting to make poetry, which are the same thing. Now, just as it was then, in classical antiquity. New York is Rome. London, Paris, Mexico City—it’s all Rome.

Hecklers start to demand that she get on with the poems. Eventually she gets there. While she reads, I catch a few of the lines as she renders them: “Go court your new broke bitch, you know she’s a peasant, right? She literally spins wool. Go and court her instead of me.” Caroline only manages to get through four of the six poems before she has to leave to go to the reading at Bathhouse. When she gets off stage she seems a bit flustered, like she’s angry or about to start crying. She stops by me on her way out. Oh Mike, I love you, she says. I love you too Caroline, I say. Don’t make me look dumb, she adds. Don’t worry, I would simply lie before doing such a thing, I tell her.

Alex. The sassy gay poet-professor. “Like Vicky, I’m also opposed to gay marriage,” he begins. Scattered boos. “This is pride month,” a heckler says. A few more self-deprecating gay jokes. “I think Caroline Calloway is more interested in the performance of being a writer than being a writer.” This elicits a few more boos. “What? The fag had to say it! I know I’m not getting many fans here tonight.” He then reads a short poem dedicated to the various establishments of Dimes Square that have all kicked him out.

Vicky. It’s finally time for Vicky. The crowd cheers for a bit in anticipation for her entrance, but the applause starts to die down before she emerges from behind the curtain. Someone who seems to be an authority gestures for another round of applause, which again dies before Vicky comes out. This repeats a few more times. Once Vicky finally emerges, her male lackey begins to serenade her with an original composition. He hits a bunch of falsetto notes. Then he urges the audience to join him in singing “Empire State of Mind.” Eventually the crowd starts to get impatient again. He finally hands it off to Vicky, calling her “a real child of god.”

Someone on Twitter once described Vicky as a “sexy insect” or something like that. She is hot in an abject, bug-eyed way. I imagine her likeness in a heterosexual version of Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch where the Interzone is in Lagos rather than Tangier. But that’s not really her essence, it’s just how I’d style her.

Thank you God thank you Mitchell thank you Madeline thank you Jesus, Vicky says. She holds a thick packet of papers containing her poems, which are written in the aphoristic style of her tweets. Most of the poems are about God, Jesus, Nigeria, Michael Jackson, autism, Miami, and resisting the temptation of lust. A few notes I scribbled down:

“It’s hard to be Woah Vicky sometimes. I got too much motion. People try to benefit off my motion.”

“A proverb: If you don’t have a plan, Miami gonna make a plan for you.”

“A psalm: Make no mistake, this is spiritual warfare.”

“Here’s a poem about my thoughts about reading the Bible: It’s so true.”

“My poem about Kamala Harris: Kamala Harris is a witch.”

“What comes before marriage? I don’t believe in boyfriend-girlfriend. If you not married, you single.”

It takes about a half hour for Vicky to get through her packet of cantos, and the crowd’s patience starts to wane as she hits her final stretch. “This is boring as fuck,” says some stylish girl standing beside me while handing out Camel Crushes to her friends. The other members of the press seem to be generally delighted with the frivolity of the evening. Their delight will be reflected in a series of articles published the following week, which will in turn elicit outrage and online engagement. The ultimate effect is the illusion that Woah Vicky is someone you should have some kind of opinion on. At some point I will probably use Mitch’s services, once the book is ready.

Afterwards I find myself at Funny Bar with Gasda, his new psychoanalyst fiancée, and a few others from the reading. We’re debating whether to leave Funny Bar and find Mitch, who is taking Vicky to sing Michael Jackson karaoke on St. Marks. What more could I possibly get out of following Mitch and Vicky around at this hour, Gasda says, I’m not the one with a story to finish. At least you’ve got a lot for your serial Satyricon. Now the readers are all mad at each other over a bunch of inane dramas, and Caroline has even brought her grievance to Instagram stories. What?!, I exclaim, I must check immediately. [Pic attached] Gasda also happens to be carrying Vicky’s poetry packet. It’s opened to the page of the Kamala Harris poem, which simply reads “Kamala Harris is a which.”