Alex Kazemi’s Y2K Cruelty Crusade Party Novel

“A lot of my decisions of creating immoral, unlikeable, repulsive characters was because I feel like that’s more real,” Kazemi says of his debut novel New Millenium Boyz. A teen drama set at the beginning of Y2K, the book follows Brad, a senior who meets two new students, Lusif and Shane, during his last year of high school. Constantly watching MTV, idolizing people like Marilyn Manson and the aforementioned Columbine shooters, the three boys gaybash, hurl racial epithets at students, mutilate rats on their Handycams, all in an effort to escape the blandness of suburbia. Each shocking action escalates as they attempt to surprise themselves, and the sheer plunge Kazemi must have done to create each grotesque thought is one of the most consistently astounding facets of the book. “I took out this new book on Hitler at the library, but I got too hard reading it,” Lu, the worst of the three, admits. “I ended up just jerking all night.”

Kazemi’s characters are horrendous and heavy to read, and it wasn’t easy to sit with them during the book’s long writing process. “It’s not a happy thing every morning to work on this. I’m dealing with very intense, dark things,” he tells me. It’s bursting with pop culture references — what song is playing on the radio, food items the characters eat, what band is on everyone’s shirts — one reference took about two or three hours to fact-check, he says. “Probably the reason why it took ten years was the fact that it was a period piece and the research was done in libraries, university databases, messageboard archives, archive.org, YouTube home videos, pictures.”

The early 2000s, Kazemi says, was the most recent period we were all tuned into the same content. Brad and his friends constantly call each other up, ask if they saw what just happened on MTV. “I was trying to capture this last moment of adolescent culture that was controlled by an arena of systems. It’s not like your generation with a billion different algorithms brainwashing you and separating the culture around your peers. You might not know a Twitch streamer your friend really likes, or even a porn star your friend really likes from OnlyFans or Twitter. Everyone gets their different cultural reality, and it never really merges people together.” Whatever I scroll past daily is likely completely different from my friends. “So much of cultural camaraderie came from that glue and that system of pop culture being simplified,” he says.

New Millenium Boyz first showed up on Tumblr as a snippet titled “Yours Truly, Brad Sela,” where it attracted the praise of artists who were online at the time and took notice in Kazemi’s drive and pivot to artistry after working as a music journalist. People like Marina Diamandis, Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX, the trifecta of melancholy sad gay pop. He no longer keeps in touch with Del Rey, but in recent years, has expanded his celebrity repertoire — he’s on a first-name basis with Bret Easton Ellis, whose American Psycho feels like it harbors New Millennium Boyz as a prequel, and in 2018, Taylor Swift invited him to come backstage to chat before her blockbuster Reputation Stadium Tour.

These chance encounters are due to the occult study of magic — he’s an open practitioner of Kabbalah, and allegedly manifested the Swift meet-up, a creative partnership with Marilyn Manson and Ellis, and more. His first book, 2020’s Pop Magick, detailed the experience of visualization, rituals, and sigils in order to bend reality to your will. Madonna posted herself reading it, something Kazemi visualized, and he attributes much of his career success to his practices. (Surprisingly, he sat the recent ‘Super Blue Moon’ out: “lots of planets are in retrograde,” he explains). “Everything is because of magick,” he says, “I visualized talking to you.” He points at the image of me on his computer screen, but I can’t be sure if he says this to every person who interviews him.

Pop Magick also documents his terminal offline-ness: rare for a young person, a writer, but also for someone so invested in culture. “You have to unplug the IV drip of the internet when you’re writing a book,” he explains.

He’s surprised, then, when I mention the current mainstream literary skew towards fiction that soothes or acts as a comforting blanket rather than excites or provokes. Think of the willfully uncritical revisit of Lolita that sparked discourse last month, or the countless Emily Henry reads that promise a satisfying conclusion over intrigue or human flaw. A Little Life author Hanya Yanigihara was very publicly critiqued for writing intricate, traumatic novels where gay men undergo countless hardships and pain, “only so she can swoop in and save them.” A recent Lux Magazine piece found flaws in Jen Beagin and Melissa Broder’s latest novels depicting bisexual women — Milk Fed’s narrator, the author writes, “treats the object of her desire as an abstraction rather than a person,” which is the point of the book. The narrator doesn’t see her partner as a human, which makes for an exploration of fetishization and the underbelly of our psyche. Is a healthy, normal relationship really the most interesting plot for a novel?

Kazemi has no desire to write a candy-coated revisionist book. “I think that’s very dangerous. I don't think morality should be a part of fiction or characters,” he says. Part of the inspiration for New Millennium Boyz, he says, was borne out of seeing John Greene books like The Fault In Our Stars when he was younger. “I wanted to subvert [those books]. That was my first reaction, being like, ‘Fuck this saccharine, sanitized version of being a teenager. I’m gonna make the dirtiest, worst depiction of adolescence that I can figure out.’”

True to his word, Boyz is a heavy read — test readers had to take several breaks. He wrote “really depraved, fucked-up things that haunt me,” for example, when the boys ambush a girl with Down’s Syndrome, attacking her with SuperSoakers full of their urine. “That was so gross and horrible, so sad,” he says, but to make a complete, final product exposing people’s nostalgia of Y2K, and the horrible cruelty of teen boys at the time, he had to push creatively to see how deplorable he could make these characters. “If I choose to make a really gruesome portrait of something, I always want there to be a sense of purpose or intention or meaning. I’m not interested in vapid shock for the sake of nothing. I hope that every calculated shocking decision through the prose and the narrative was meant for a reason, for the story.” During the scene where they carve open a rat, Brad notes, “Boys feed on the lust of other boys.”

When I bring up the cultural climate of the internet he’s missing out on, the quick-to-cancel, high alert Twitter users that are happy to misread a work of satire, instead projecting the novel’s themes and behaviors onto their author, Kazemi isn’t that nervous. “Maybe someone will go after me in that way, and just be totally offended by it,” he admits. “But I think if anything, a liberal person or a feminist should read it and see that I’m exposing a lot of the corrosive animated aspects of growing up as a young man in the Y2K era.” Already, there are one-star Goodreads reviews, lamenting the book’s misogynist dialogue and latent homophobia. “If someone is just gonna be reactionary and outraged about it… I mean, there are smart readers and there are dumb readers,” he sums up. “Also, it’s a weird fucking time. Don’t straight girls read The Sluts by Dennis Cooper on TikTok and stuff? It’s a totally bizarre time.”

Most of the boys’ horrendous actions are on camera. In their suburban environment, the boys lust for something more, and start videotaping themselves acting out — on drugs, carving ‘SATAN’ into each others’ forearms with knives — producing Marilyn Manson-esque snuff films. Of the three of them, Brad is the most self-conscious, to a debilitating effect, which produces the novel’s most interesting ideas about identity. Brad has fun on camera, but that isn’t the real him, he insists, he was simply inhabiting a separate persona.

“You’re a victim of your own hoax,” the astute Lusif tells Brad in one scene. “Your life was so meaningless that not even your own manufactured storylines could save you from the emptiness that consumes you.” He goes on to warn, “At some point, you are going to slip, embarrass yourself, and it’s going to hurt so much worse than if you were honest from the start.”

The event that kicked the writing process into full-speed, Kazemi says, is the infamous call between Taylor Swift and Kanye West that leaked in 2016 and went on to define each of the performers’ careers, forever. “[The call] really changed everything for me, of trying to understand the private and public self and performance of the self. We all know all people at that level of being in the public and controlling your image, wanting everything to seem so seamless, but I always wanted to be transparent about that stuff.” Using Brad as an avatar, Kazemi interrogates this exhausting need to craft a meticulous image of yourself — it really shouldn’t be surprising that Snapchat and Instagram lead to Machiavillian behavior, he says. At the end of the book, when Lu threatens to shoot up the high school’s prom in an effort to occupy the same mystique as the Columbine shooters, he blackmails Brad into keeping quiet about it, or else Lu will release the tapes they recorded. “I don’t care who gets hurt as long as I become the vision that I have of myself to this world,” Brad admits. He doesn’t tell anyone.

Despite the long road of rejections and rewrites, magickal rituals and visualization, Kazemi is cosmically cool about how the book will enter the world. “I can do my best by trying to influence the universe through magic and my will and my work ethic, but whatever ends up happening, I can’t really control that.”

We’re talking about Tumblr during one of our many asides — through our conversation, he asks me questions, too, my opinion on recent novels, what I thought of his ending, as if I were a beta reader instead of someone with a finished product — when he says, “Alex Kazemi is kind of like Electra Heart, in a way.” Electra Heart is the alter-ego of Marina and the Diamonds, a persona she donned for her 2012 album of the same name. So is Alex Kazemi a façade? Did he write New Millenium Boyz, or did the person I’m speaking to? “My soul channeled NMB,” he answers. “Alex Kazemi is definitely someone who is an avatar or vehicle for me to challenge facets of culture and to get people to think and question things. But of course, my art is a part of him, for sure,” he ends.

Persona or not, it’s admirable Kazemi sought out to write about one of the scariest things we can experience — reality. The novel is obviously overly provocative and absurdist at points, but his main goal was to dig deep and re-enact what teenagers were actually talking about: cruelty, crassness, and atrocities included. “I don’t know if I derive joy out of being a provocateur,” he says. “I think it’s sort of sad that we have a literary climate where a book like this could be provocative. We should be engaging with the shadow self and the darker side of the human psyche and our cultural psyche.”

Kazemi’s words often remind me of when Lu uses his masterful insight on the world to make a real point — when his broken, horrible clock is right twice a day. “One thing I hope you learned from me is that reality is a horror show,” he tells Brad one day. “It’s worse than anything you could imagine. It’s too gruesome to be portrayed in art. You have to be there for it. Alive. It’s all around us. It’s beautiful. It’s going down, right now.”

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.