Notes from Underground

July 2nd

I wake inside a sublet in the lowest, most eastern edge of the Lower East Side. I haven’t slept in Manhattan since 2009 when I moved to the city after working in Paris. Back then I hosted at Lucien, and following a couple months of enduring the bistro’s tyrannical owner, I went to LA where I’ve lived ever since.

In LA I flitted around the edges of many scenes and watched them all swell, crest and collapse. These days I’ve been thinking specifically about those scenes for here, improbably and quite surreally, I find myself near the epicenter of LA’s underground literary earthquake.

What drives scenes? What attracts so many artists and dreamers, graspers and grifters to them? I’ve come to NYC for many reasons: to hook a lit agent, to schmooze with publishers and editors, to debut Casual Encountersz. But mainly I want to experience NYC’s literary scene to get a better understanding of my own.

That night friend invited me to Clandestino.

“This is NYC’s Prado,” they assure me.

The two bars, like America’s twin great metropolises, are impossibly different. Their one similarity: I spend many nights watching poets and sex freaks doing drugs in their bathrooms.

July 3rd

Honey’s rooftop is ringed with Bushwickerati: blue hair, septum rings, stick-and-poke tats. Poet Lily Lady emcee’s the reading with an aristocratic flair, as if they can’t be rushed nor bothered.

“What about a Casual Encountersz at the Ritz?” Lady asks after the reading, once they realize I’m the writer who’s been pestering them the past few weeks. “I’ll have a room there, actually.”

I plan to host three NYC Casual Encountersz, a mini tour of sorts. Debuting CE as an invite-only reading inside a five-star suite with Lady’s gang of queer poets?

“Sounds chic,” I say.

July 6th

After the reading at Village Works, everyone goes to Scratcher. Even my friends The Poet and the Sex Freak tag along. Sometimes I worry that everyone I know is either a poet or a sex freak.

I’m trying to chat up Tracy O’Neill, a novelist who has agreed to read at the second NYC CE, but who now sits behind an IPA. Running CE, I’ve learned that nothing qualifies as confirmed until they’re standing behind the mic. After a few too many tequilas, I work up the courage to cozy up to O’Neill who turns out to be a pro, I mean the woman has a PhD—of course she’s showing up! I need to relax, this month of puzzling together readers and venues won’t be easy if I can’t keep a lid on my neurosis.

Meanwhile Nylon reporter Sophia June and her gang are partying in the back booths and invite us to another bar. We meet there and soon we are trading numbers, Instascams, everyone asking about the upcoming readings.

NYC’s fluidity is unimaginable in LA’s sprawl. It’s mesmerizing, addictive. For a social butterfly like me it’s uncut cocaine.

July 10th

Two days until the Ritz CE. Instascammers and sub slackers harass me for the addy. One ‘journalist’ DMs that she wants to write a takedown of Crumps, the leftist infamous for his substacks mapping Dimes Square’s alt right whack jobs. I’m freaking that 100 people turn up and get us shutdown.

“Stop acting like a little bitch,” snaps my mentor, exiled London-based New Yorker writer Alexis Okeowo when I FaceTime them for advice. “Keep it together!”

July 12th

The Drift party is packed with the literary establishment, or what the ‘establishment’ calls the ‘underground’ and what the ‘underground’ nicknames ‘The Grift.’

Drinks are $18. Something criminal about it. I love The Drift. I subscribe and submit (and get rejected). But even I give away free booze at CE. Readings—even transcendent ones full of talented, hot writers—are still trench warfare. Obliteration is the only way to survive. But it’s fine. One of the sex freaks sneaks in Mich Ultras and another’s got ketamine and we’re off to the races.

Editors, agents, and journalists with the power to transform beatniks’ lives mingle and flirt. Everyone’s asking where I studied and I fight the urge to lie that I went to Brown or have an MFA from Columbia. Drift-world attracts a scholastic, pedigreed crowd, one I’ve always envied, admired and oddly feel part of, even if I attended a mediocre university and missed out on the MFA pyramid scheme.

While dancing a debonair lit agent asks for my manuscript. This type of networking rarely happens in LA and crystallizes an important distinction: NYC’s literary circles may be ruthless, but that’s in part because there’s stakes with contracts, commissions, and deals dangling before everyone’s eyes. Back home, my beatnik LA scene lacks those opportunities, which helps keep it youthful, bohemian, and in the shadow of Hollywood’s greed, radical. But what does literature lose without capitalism’s professionalized switchblade at its throat?

I spot reporter and legendary tweeter Joe Bernstein who I invited to CE. Yet among the pantheon of shitposting deities, Bernstein lives lower down on Mt. Olympus. The Zeus is Naomi Fry and she’s nowhere to be seen. Will Fry join the fray?

Socialite and writer Sophia June glides by atop vintage platforms and introduces me to Drift founder and the evening’s starlet Rebecca Panovka. We talk Mexico City and doppelgängers all while I suss out the afterparty deets.

Meanwhile the crowd’s thinning, the potty-trained media class turning in early, when as if on cue Naomi Fry arrives. We’ve been DMing, as one does, about the Doors, Guns ’n’ Roses, and the Jews. If there’s any NYC writer I want to cover CE, it’s Fry.

“Hi Sammy,” Fry says, greeting me as if we’re old pals, as if I weren’t some rando Instascammer. “You’re going to High Dive?”

We trail Fry to the afterparty, but she melts away faster than the ice in my soda water. Does she realize I think she’s the most hilarious of all shitposters? I’m about to find Fry and confess when the sole of Sophia June’s platform breaks off.

What can a broken shoe portend about the fragile nature of scenes? I wonder as a friend jerry-rigs the platform back together with plastic grocery sacks. Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing, perhaps it’s time for bed.

July 13th

The Ritz is a fortress and as Lily Lady pads barefoot through the lobby, I worry how we’re gonna sneak 30+ freaks past the army of doormen guarding the hotel.

“Fuck the Ritz,” says Lady, in the elevator, gliding up to the 14th floor.

Sex workers, Semiotext(e) dolls, and one Paris Review editor cram into the room. Poet Matt Starr recounts sucking off hotdogs and Mackenzie Thomas reads teenage sexcapades. Crumps does crumps and poets Sul Mousavi and Zoey Greenwald salute mothers and youth. Maddie Vasquez weeps while memorializing a fallen poet. Reclining across the bed, Lily Lady closes out the night and tells everyone to leave.

But before the room clears, a pillow fight erupts, Lady and a bunch of poets jumping up and down, bashing each other, ecstatic, euphoric, electric.

July 21st

Sovereign House hums with the launch of Heavy Traffic Magazine. The crowd’s mixed between Dimes Square glitterati and Drift world and others I can’t ID.

There are no readings which makes it easier to observe NYC’s literary factions circle each other like fighters in the ring. Writing has more in common with boxing than anyone admits. Much has been whispered about downtown, the rumored tech financiers and alt-right politics, the clout chasers and Catholic converts. To be honest everyone I meet is warmer and friendlier than the internet’s bare knuckled discourse would ever suggest. Any scene, no matter its participants or politics, burns on the gasoline of spectacle. It’s what attracts so many to its heat. Everyone wants to see and be seen, especially one of the sex freaks who turns up.

“Good people on both sides,” she says, eyeing the buzzing room.

July 22nd

The Second NYC CE at Powerhouse Arena makes me nervous because the lineup is legit, serious writers. People with agents, books deals, degrees. My world in LA is club kids writing on Notes App. By contrast NYC feels like the big leagues. Legend Sam Lipsyte, and icons Tracy O’Neill, Sarah Wang and Jessica Denzer.

Guests arrive with flowers.

“You’re here for the reading?” I ask.

“No,” one snaps. “We’re here for Loré.”

Meaning poet Loré Yessuff. Another serious writer. All poets need a gang at their back.

Serious writers are usually good writers. They’re not chronically online. Might be something there worth consideration, though as a full-blown Instascammer, I’m not digging any further.

July 24th

The Bowery Poetry Project. Free mezcal and $5 Tecates. The audience snaps after each reading.

Bohemians are forever and I love them.

July 25th

Matt Starr and Zack Roif host the Perverted Book Club in sex shops, but in person they’re quite wholesome, the type women bring home to meet daddy. At Dream Baby’s Fan Fiction event the lineups center performers, artists, dancers. Everyone’s glamorous, polished, poised. Party bunny Brock Coylar gushes they’re delighted to meet me and follows back on Instascam.

Do any of these scenes produce good literature? Does mine? Maybe that’s the wrong question. More interesting is if these scenes antagonize and entertain, if they foster humanity and friendship. Screens and phones dominate our lives—a reading is one of the few live, communal experiences left and maybe helps explain the energy behind the tidal wave of reading series. Somehow the metric of good vs. bad seems beside the point.

Besides, it’s tricky to predict who will emerge from the swell while it’s still frothing and surging, swallowing up some and spitting out others. Maybe it’ll be easier to answer once the wave breaks.

July 27th

The crowd squeezes into François Ghebaly, spilling out onto the patio. For the NYC CE Finale, the lineup mirrors my literary tastes: Archway Editions beatniks Chris Molnar, Naomi Falk and Heavy Halo, along with Big 5 novelists Daniel Magariel, Megan Nolan and Hannah Lillith Assadi. For spice I toss in hottie translator Samuel Rutter and Neoliberalhell provocateur Matthew J. Donovan. Go low, go high, go out with a bang.

Gallerists, MFAs and goths, Maoists and edgelords mix and mingle. I’m begging everyone to come inside, quiet down and not touch the art.

The gallery’s a sauna and with the heat my mind wanders over the past month: ketafiend poets, alcoholic novelists, writing every morning and partying every night with NYC’s endless supply of crooks and con jobs, schemers and the scammers. The 20 writers I’ve curated into three Casual Encountersz during this hellaciously hot July. The journalists, agents and editors I’ve tried to seduce into caring about my manuscript. And what have I learned? I wonder as the boxes of Ami Ami run dry and Ghebaly’s staff throws us out.

We return to Clandestino and like an omen another of Sophia June’s platforms breaks. Again. Maybe June’s shaky platforms signal that literary scenes, no matter how professional or bohemian, how good or bad, are doomed to collapse, that their ephemerality is what makes them magnetic, unique, special.

Meanwhile people keep introducing themselves, saying we met at one of the CEs or another reading or just out and about. It’s strange because though I try to introduce myself and make everyone feel welcomed at Casual Encountersz, often I’m blacked out with anxiety and don’t remember much. Only that it was debaucherous, that I was moved by pretty words, that I was surrounded by so many beautiful people.

Culture

The Club Is Coming to the Stage

We enter and make our way to what is approximately front left of the DJ booth, where we’re accustomed to dancing at clubs in New York. “So is this a techno club or a dance performance?” yells an uncertain participant in my boyfriend’s ear. He laughs, bouncing along to Ben UFO, and yells back, “It’s both!” The club has long been a hot topic in European contemporary dance but it is only now making its way into New York performance venues, largely through transatlantic tours. R.O.S.E. follows recent examples like Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1 (May 2024), (LA)HORDE’s Room with a View at NYU Skirball (October 2023), and Gisèle Vienne’s Crowd at BAM (October 2022).

Do these performances compromise the club’s spirit — a space idealized for its anonymity, dark lighting, and thundering music? The notion of the club as a utopian escape is admittedly just that — an ideal — because of how its intense conditions can create barriers to entry. Still, the club remains sacred for many, a place to forge connections and embrace an alternative state of being. Looking at how performances transfer this spirit to new settings reveals what aspects of the club are essential and those that aren’t.

Sharon Eyal, R.O.S.E. 2024. Photography by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

Eyal’s dancers make their entrance. The lighting shifts from roving blue to yellow spotlights as Ben UFO’s tracks transition to more melodic beats. Clad in deconstructed lace Dior lingerie with dark red tears painted on their faces, the dancers move cautiously in a tightly maintained pack, slicing paths through the horde with hoof-like steps and jerky leg extensions. After around ten minutes of this controlled choreography, the dancers vanish as the lighting shifts back to blue and Ben UFO picks up his dubby beats. The club, as we knew it, resumes. This cycle of tightly executed movements and free-flowing club-goers repeats several times, each time emboldening the dancers to plunge further into the crowd.

Clubbing in a building once built for the U.S. Army National Guard on Manhattan’s Upper East Side turns out to be surprisingly successful — at least for the audience. What starts as an awkward, scattered group searching for their non existent seats gradually gels into an engaged, bouncing crowd that erupts in cheers each time the dancers enter and exit. Performance patrons who might never step foot in a club find themselves swept up in its potential for communion, moving in unison with fellow ticket holders. But it isn’t until the very end of R.O.S.E. that the dancers finally break free from Eyal’s choreography and join the fired-up audience in a brief moment of improvisatory movement with the music. By keeping her dancers at arm’s length, Eyal seems more interested in the club as a backdrop for her signature movement style than wholly as a space with meaningful stories to be told.

Michele Rizzo, HIGHER xtn. 2024. Photography by Cameron Kelly courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Back in May, I attended Wire Festival, a multiday electronic music event at Knockdown Center that had no shortage of organically united dancefloors. It attracted a crowd of seasoned ravers who were eager to celebrate the start of spring as they danced alongside DJs who played well into the daylight. I left Wire in an afternoon daze to see Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1. My sleepless euphoria only deepened as the performance unfolded, starting with a lone dancer who looked plucked out of the festival.

The dancer, dressed in sneakers, baggy jeans, and a tight tank top, shuffled slowly into the gallery, perfectly in sync with the looping bars of an understated electronic melody. Soon, other dancers, clad in the same staple rave uniform, joined him — each having traveled from Europe for the U.S. museum debut of HIGHER xtn., which premiered at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in 2018 and quickly became a fixture at kunsthalles and festivals across the continent. As the score’s tempo climbed, the choreography locked into a 16-count sequence, which the dancers executed with precise synchrony. They remained intensely focused, never making eye contact with each other, as they sought release in the endless repetition of synthesized beats. Once the dancers reached their limit, they stopped the sequence and exited the gallery, one by one.

HIGHER xtn. used the focused daylight of the gallery to highlight the meditative release found in the repetitive movements that dominate dark dancefloors. The performance’s restraint brought more consistency and intentionality than Eyal’s all-encompassing club construction in R.O.S.E. Yet both performances offer enticing entry points into club culture for those who may not frequent raves. Rizzo’s ecstatic, hypnotic repetitions reveal how the club can mirror other meditative practices, while Eyal’s interpolation of performance and clubbing helped hesitant audience members blossom by the end. Still, both works overlook one of the most underappreciated aspects of clubbing — its potential for individual expression. HIGHER xtn.’s pristine uniformity especially risks promoting the outdated techno trope that there’s a “right” way to dance to electronic music.

Maybe this shortcoming is, in fact, a benefit. For habitual ravers jaded by one too many sunrise sets, it’s a reminder to return to the club with more intention. If you pause and peer through the darkness, you’ll see hundreds of people moving to the same beat, each with their own subtle variations. This collective choreography is a ready-made spectacle that doesn’t need validation in a theater or museum. And when the music shifts slightly, you can watch the ripple effect sweep through the crowd while feeling the new beat in your body. Maybe this small bit of magic is best left on the dance floor.

Culture

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Culture

Porsche SCOPES Brings Art, Music, and Design to Toronto

The festival was a full immersion into Toronto’s dynamic creative energy. Day one set the tone with DJ collective Living Room, followed by an experimental performance by Claire Rousay that captivated the crowd. Jewelry designer Steff Eleoff unveiled her Porsche Taycan 4S art car installation—a bold fusion of automotive and wearable art inspired by her Sedona ring—while OVO Sound’s Naomi Sharon and DVSN wrapped up the night with powerful, genre-defying performances.

We witnessed SCOPES Toronto bridging underground and mainstream with day two’s lineup. DJ Korea Town Acid’s set paved the way for Angelphroot and Dameer’s debut of BASSMATI, a track blending South Asian influences with bass-driven sounds. Chippy Nonstop’s return to Toronto and Richie Hawtin’s extended set were milestones of the evening, proving that the city’s underground scene has a global resonance.

The final day featured standout performances from local pianist Harrison, Indigenous artist Tia Wood, and hip-hop visionary Sean Leon, who elevated his set with a live choir. Moonshine Collective’s film and musical performance explored themes of African utopia, showcasing art’s power to bridge culture and technology. Rising Toronto star SadBoi, who paused her tour to perform at SCOPES, further underscored the festival’s commitment to nurturing local talent.

Throughout the weekend, we experienced installations from artists like Mitsu Mitsu and culinary creations from Bar Mordecai, capturing the multifaceted creativity Porsche SCOPES brought to Toronto. This milestone 10th edition, open to all, allowed Toronto’s vibrant arts scene to thrive, underscoring SCOPES’ mission to celebrate local talent while connecting it to a global audience.

office had the chance to connect with rising star SadBoi ahead of the event. In our conversation, she shared insights into her creative journey and reflected on what performing and growing up in Toronto means to her and her work.

How are you, and where are you at right now? You told me you were traveling.

Um, I’m good, I’m feeling really good right now. I’m traveling back to Salt Lake City. I had a show yesterday in Seattle. I’m on tour right now with Coco and Claire.

How is touring life treating you? Do you like it?

I love being on the road. To be honest, I feel like I don’t know—like I’ve had good experiences and bad ones—but this time it’s really fun, especially with the people I’m surrounded by. It’s also the longest tour I’ve been on; I have about four more weeks to go. I’m trying not to think about how many days I have left.

Do you feel homesick?

Yes, because when I start thinking about how many days are left, I start to miss my dogs. I’ve just been trying to stay in the moment—I don’t even know what day of the week it is, to be honest with you.

Oh, sweet! What are your dogs’ names?

Jillian and Winston. I know, they’re crazy names.

You’ll be performing at SCOPES in Toronto, which is where you grew up. Do you feel like the crowd is different when you perform in Toronto compared to other cities?

Yes, I mean, Toronto just feels different because it’s home. Every time I come back to perform, something in my career has changed. The last time I performed in Toronto, people just wanted to have a good time, and I’m excited to perform back home again to see everyone’s reactions. I know it’s going to be different from the last time. It’s exciting to see your own growth. Toronto is a tough crowd, though. If we’re with you, we’re really with you.

So, they’re super picky? You have to gain their respect, or what is it?

I think Toronto people are in their own world, but when something really connects with them, they’ll lose themselves in the moment. But it takes something to bring them out of that. Toronto crowds are tough because even if they like you, they won’t show it outright until they’re really vibing with you.

It’s like a vibe check, right?

Exactly. They’ll enjoy your performance, but it’s hard to explain. When people visit Toronto, they often say, “Oh, you guys are so nice,” and I’m like, “I don’t think we’re that nice, we’re just polite.” Like, you can walk down the street, and no one will say anything, but it’s just our mannerisms.

You mentioned Toronto can have a moody energy, especially at night, and that the underground night scene there really inspires you. Can you talk more about what makes Toronto's nightlife so influential for you?

Absolutely, Toronto has this unique energy that comes alive at night. Similar to New York, there are the popular clubs everyone knows, but you need to find your niche—the people who know where the real parties are. I remember going to raves in high school yards, sneaking in because I wasn’t old enough. Events like Baby, Jerk!, and Yes Yes Y’all were pivotal, exposing me to DJs blending dancehall with EDM—something I hadn’t seen before. Toronto nightlife is moody and intense, but when everyone’s out, it’s like the whole city is alive.