Pomeranian Debuts at the Red Room

Hi Montana, how's it going?

I’m good, how are you?

I’m pretty good. It’s good to see you again, when was last time, past Thursday? Wednesday? Thursday.

I think it was Wednesday, but honestly I don't know. It was such a blur for me, kind of overwhelming.

In a good way though. It was a sexy evening in the red room. Great energy, good people - good cake? I wouldn't know because I missed it.

It was pretty perfect.

Wanna get into it?

Let’s get into it.

For those who are not familiar with you and your work, where are you from?

I was borned in Los Angeles, but I do not claim that. I moved to New York when I was maybe six? I remember turning seven here. I was really born again and again and then raised in NYC, I call myself a New York kid.

You're one of the rare ones! The sought after. I moved here myself rather recently and I’d say seven of every tenth person I’m running into is originally from elsewhere, mostly various parts from The States.

I know what you’re talking about. I went to college in the city – Parsons – and I remember meeting all these people realizing that oh they can drive!

A driver license equals "I’m from elsewhere."

Hence I don’t have one.

Neither do I...

You’re an original New York writer, how early on did you start exploring with poetry? Do you consider yourself a poet at this point?

I think I’ve always — ever since I was a little LA kid — wanted to write poetry. It’s something I've spoken openly about. But I’m also very interested in performance. I studied fine arts, and so that came with various forms of expression. Poetry has always been close to me but I’d say in the past three, four years I started diving into it deeply, developing a rigorous practice with it, even the visual art I make is very reliant on language and poetic images.

“Born a performer” — was the first thing my seatmate turned and said to me once you were done performin.

It makes it light, yet at the very same time there is definitely a self seriousness and sometimes weird restraints with poetry and with what I do. I’m just aiming for an entertaining, fun time. I want it to be explosive when I get on stage. I get high off of that.

Loving the attention?

Give it to me!

Do you write for yourself or for your audience, then? I ask myself this question from time to time.

I write for humans who can read, you know? It’s very simple to me, I don’t think about specific demographics or elements as such. I believe that the people who are partial to my writing are people who like to laugh at themself, are non judgemental but also critical — people who live under the weight of beholding everything at once.

Yet on some level, I write for myself first. It starts by making sense of the world and how beautiful it is and how confusing it is and how sexy it is and how wrong it is — it’s all of the above. But then I want everybody to read it. That’s why I try to keep the language simple and unassuming, so anyone has the ability to dive right in.

Are you one of those who relate to the “I write to create myself” -phrase?

No. I don’t resonate with any of that. Everything that one writes is obviously about oneself, you can’t deny that. But I try to step outside of myself as far as possible, I try to make it universal. And to make the world a bit more exciting for the people around me.

I think we can consider that achieved.

Do you want to tell us about the dogs, where do they enter the picture?

I’m fascinated by dogs and the relationship between dogs and humans. I find the relationship kind of disturbing and hilarious at the same time. It’s really weird, both sick and sweet. For example, if you take the smartest rocket scientist on earth, they still sound dumb when they are talking to their pets and, on top of that, in the same gesture, it makes them sound stupid. We’re earnesty and unconsciously performing a very real power dynamic with this living thing that we are more powerful than, and have ownership over.

It’s just a lot of fear and love and ridiculousness and earnestness all wrapped into these relationships, and I will eternally be fascinated with that.

It’s so performative. That’s the word. I adore watching people on the street whose dogs look like a copy-and-paste collage of themself.

Definitely. I’m not particularly a pet person, but watching people with their pets it’s an obsession of mine. My friends all have dogs so I can choose when I want to be around them, but I can’t have them all the time. I’m too close to a past life in which I was a dog to own a dog.

I'll quote that. Why Pomeranians though? What’s significant about them? I know nothing about the different breeds.

Well, I don't really know that much either, about anything really. But what strikes me about Pomeranians is how stunning they are. They look like a luxury. And they look like something man-made. On top of that Pomeranian is a beautiful word which also refers to the historical region of Pomerania, which for an American sensibility conjures almost mythological feelings. One might even think about Pompeii. The clash of a historical region and a man-made living creature.

When I think of Pomeranians walking I think of them strutting down the sidewalk.

Absolutely, they’re fabulous.

In what ways are poets similar to pomeranians?

They might have small brains.

Small brains, big ideas.

Small brains, big hearts.

Big heart, just as the man in my favorite poem out of the ones you performed to us. Is it called Tuesday Lunch? The one where the woman ends up dead.

It's called a Seikilos Epitaph.

Do you feel like life is as absurd as Seikilos Epitaph? The picture you’re painting is so bizarre, yet then again it feels like a normal wine lunch in West Village.

That piece actually started while I was out walking in the West Village. I noticed two couples having lunch and I started observing them, placing myself outside the scenario. One woman was coughing and her husband was pounding her back–really dramatically — to help her. I found that immediately hilarious because it’s so violent yet it’s an act of love and care. It’s got all the right opposing elements.

It ends up with her dying covered in low-fat whipped cream.

"I’m too close to a past life in which I was a dog to own a dog."

Out of this collection which is your personal favorite, do you have a dearest child?

Oh, that's a hard one. I don't have a favorite but I do love Divorce because of its simplicity. Many of the other poems take on a broader narrative. Yet the one that I always come back to is Boy Scouts of America, which is the one about the kids selling corn. It really weaves through American childhood, and it’s a little bit about me. My friends all love that, which makes me enjoy it even more.

It pins down the American experience, whatever that means. How much of a “pain in the ass” were you towards Fred [the illustrator]? I remember you acknowledging that in your mid-way-through-thank-you speech.

I consider myself a pain in the ass. I’m a perfectionist, I prefer things to be exactly how I imagine them. Fred is a brilliant artist, his collages have this fun and romantic sensibility that I love, and I felt like it accompanied my written words really well.

Him and I went through alot of phases of drafts. We started super zoomed in–in the back of the book there is a picture of a lady with a fork over–then we zoomed all the way out with this giant world map and in the end we found ourselves in the middle ground with what ended up being the cover.

It was all Fred’s mind. And then there was me relentlessly nagging and nagging “let's try it this way.” Ok. “Well, why don't we try it this way?” “Why don't we try doing this?” Months and months of back and forth. He was patient with me, Fred is really so sweet, I mean all of them are; Dirt Child [publishers] too. Gideon and Mal, they’re both fabulous to work with. I was constantly calling them about nonsense in the middle of the night, they were fully asleep.

Pain in the ass indeed. Yet served with pleasure. Did all of you know each other ahead of the project or how did the constellation form?

I knew Gideon through the reading scene. They actually published my friend's chap book — Carson Jordan’s Good For Her — and so I sent my work over and they were like, "Let’s do it!”. Fred and I met while I was living in Pittsburgh for a moment, through the art community there.

Love it when good projects bring together good people.

Totally. That's what the party felt like too. I felt like everyone was just having a good time.

Indeed, it was such an energetic atmosphere. Everybody was cheering, I heard some (human) barking. The crowd was buying books. For those who missed the evening, where can they get their hands on their own copy?

You can purchase it on the Dirt Child website. It’s also going to be at Retail Pharmacy, in New York, where we will be hosting another reading on November 18th.

Save the date!

Save the date.

And you save me some cake, this time?

I will absolutely save you some cake. But you have to let me know — do you want a centerpiece, a corner piece or mostly icing?

Mostly icing, always.

Me too. I love the icing.

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

Real Slick, Jack: Psyche Organic Arrives in New York

Shop Psyche Organic at Happier Grocery and Dimes. Coming soon to @citarellagourmetmarket @unionmarket @gourmetgarage @deciccos @fairwaymarket plus many more.

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.