Notes on Kampf
1
I miss Dimes Square. Not that I was ever part of it. Or of any other scene for that matter. But of all the scenes I have not been part of, I enjoyed not being part of Dimes Square the most — far more than I enjoy not being part of the current lit scene, whatever that is.
2
The best thing about Dimes Square was that there was so little to envy in it. No great or memorable art. No one scaling the heights of undeserved acclaim. No excessive glamor to be slob-shamed by. Whatever FOMO it induced was easily remedied by attending a couple of readings a week, cloutscrolling Instagram, and memorizing Crumpstack.1 You didn’t even need to go to the afterparties.
3
The next best thing about Dimes Square was the mise-en-scène. It didn’t take long to learn the cast of characters and keep up with their storylines. The art being produced lay not in the texts that were read but in the events at which they were read, the personae assembled and the dramatics between them. Dimes Square was not a scene but the performance of one. Under the auspices of alt-lit, its denizens were in fact producing auto theater.
4
Clout was the intangible form of Dimes Square capital. It was fairly easy to come by. All you had to do was attend any party hosted by Matthew Donovan,2 lit event featuring Cassidy3 or Peter Vack,4 follow all their followers, then write a scene report about it that included everyone writing a scene report that might include you. Alternatively, you could just post post-ironic memes —the one new art form invented by Dimes Square — a unit of virality that relieved expression of accountability to meaning.
5
Thielbucks were the tangible form of Dimes Square capital. Not so easy to come by, they were reserved for the cryptos -- fascists and bros. The contrarian impulse that first gave them avant sex appeal was doomed from the outset by the ambition to supplant the cathedral of wokeness with the blockchain of anti-woke correctness. Chains being anathema to anarchists, even the nihilistic, rightwing ones.
6
Thus, Dimes Square offered little to envy and even less to covet. The rewards were slim. You could become a NIMCEL5 or a DOGE boy, a Partiful Monster or an Edgelord. But the traditional returns of art stardom, Wealth, Fame and the Love of Beautiful Groupies were not on offer. Since everyone was a player in everyone else’s autofiction, everyone was potentially each other’s groupie, thereby defeating the monopolistic cravings of the creative will to power.
7
What Dimes Square offered in place of material rewards was cosplay and selfie-deception –- a pretend bohemia in which to pose as part of any of the fabled art scenes of the past. Cabaret Voltaire. Monmartre. The Moveable feast. Verlaine’s Paris Wharhol’s Factory. Weimar Berlin. A collective indulgence that allowed anyone to imagine that the autofictional rendering of their everyday banality was akin to the journals of Gide, Kierkegaard or Anais Nin — disregarding the fact that it was the great minds of these individuals that lent significance to their daily lives, not the recounting of daily life that gave a mind greatness. Of course there were also a lot of drugs.
8
Everyone understands the distinction between Underground and Overground (aka, alt and mainstream) culture. But for a true art scene to emerge, let alone flourish, what is required is the development of an OverUnderground and an UnderOverground. The former consists of those individuals who have achieved sufficient proficiency, infamy glamor, and visibility within the transgressive Underground to offer themselves as its tokens The latter consists of those individuals who, having achieved, or inherited, mainstream career and financial success, long to break the monotony of their lives with new and thrilling experiences and creative companions.
9
When the downward mobility of the UnderOverground and upward mobility of the OverUnderground meet, the ensuing situationships create the touchstones of our cultural history. Warhol’s factory, where moneyed upper middle class art collectors, Capote’s Swans, and the Nureyev creme de Lincoln Center mingled with rock stars, poets, drag queens, and super stars culled from the streets. Studio 54 with its evil twin Mudd Club and side piece Odeon, hosting a half-decade party fueled by greed-is-good money and “Bolivian marching powder” where the fashion and rock elite danced, snorted and consorted with soon-to-be-famous graffiti-artists and new wave wilders.6
10
For most of its tenure the Dimes Square Underground and mainstream Overground kept their distance. Except for the short media blitz that greeted its summer of ’22 discovery, a NYTimes profile of Beckett’s7 and occasional coverage of the Perverted Book Club8 and Elena Velez, the mainstream has been content to let a whole universe of potential OverUnderground personalities go undiscovered and unpublicized while the latter have contented themselves with the dopamine rush of KGB K-holes and niche celebrityhood. By the same token the potential UnderOvergrounders have ben content with the latest restaurants, streaming services and Ocean Vuong, abandoning the quest for after-hours adventure.
13
The recent litmaxxing soirées at such upscale locations as the Ace Hotel9, The Box10, Temple Bar, and Pietro Alexander Gallery along with the sudden influx of cash-rich publications eager to commission work from the stars of alt-lit may signal that we are on the cusp another such confluence of the OverUnderground and UnderOverground. Volume0, Magazine Non Grata, the resurrected Vice, even Playboy11 have all erupted on the scene offering reputedly handsome sums for work previously destined for no more than a drunken recital from the author’s Notes app. The Rich it seems have rediscovered the joys of lit and are ready to monetize and promote with gorgeous print publications and open bars in swanky, apropriatley decadent venues. Only, the OverUnderground destined for this treatment will no longer be Dimes Square
15
Everyone, including me, says that Dimes Square is over. But why? To be sure, most of the old venues are gone and new reading series are springing up everywhere, even in the once forbidden turf of deepest DSA Brooklyn. There are many new faces, but I haven’t witnessed any of them doing anything different than what the old faces were doing at the Dimes Square readings. It’s all still first-person present-tense autofiction of young women abjection-bragging about their awful Hinge dates and sugarbaby prowess and youngish men decrying the algo annihilation of their prospects. It all sounds the same, except everyone is better dressed..
16
The Dimes Square that Nick Dove declared an “allergy’ and internalized.zoey Greenwald labelled “a jittery. . .vibe that resembled meth” has subsided. It has sloughed off its Dark Right stalkers with the deftness of a Brunson spin back and can now dribble freely. Yet its literary forms and subject matter have persisted along with its central aesthetic that the value of literature is proportional to the fuckability of its author and the number of their Instagram followers12. And it is this rampant fuckability that has attracted the money and the publications, with full-color centerfolds of hot writers and the line of UnderOverground limos that will no doubt be crowding out the curbside smokers outside the next Punisher13 reading.
17
So what is this new scene that both is and is not Dimes Square? An evolution of what was hatched in the breeding grounds of East Broadway? Its absorption and dilution by the capitalist libido it has finally managed to provoke? Or a new direction? And above all what are we to call it, as in these days of hyperinflation, we can’t be fucking with no Dimes?
18
The exodus from X following its acquisition by Musk left that platform in the hands of what had always been its ideal users — trolls. By the same token, the mass migration from Instagram to Substack by everyone with something to say14 left IG to the OGs who had alway been its innate constituency — thirst-trap influencers. And as IG is the sine qua non for promoting and assembling Zillennial events, all the recent readings from the memes announcing them, to the work being read, to the apparel of the principals has taken on that cast. We are in the Thirst Trap era of alt-lit, the transgressive eroticism that has always been its hallmark brought to the fore and amplified by an UnderOverground ready to fund and disseminate it. And as the result of all thirst traps is a slide (welcome or unwelcome) into the pepetrator’s DMs, perhaps the name for this new scene should be DMs Square.
Niche Internet Micro-Celebrity
My colleague Daniel Falatko, aka The WayBackMachine, has argued that the Vice/Pitchfork indie sleaze parties in cusp-of-gentrification Williamsburg, wherein the DotCommies molly-fied their startup losses alongside hipster rockers, was another one of these moments. But I remain agnostic, given the UnderOverground well-known, if not congenital, aversion to East River crossings
Thanks to the ministrations of Magdalene J. Taylor.
A principle first enunciate by me my Poetics of AltLitstotle.
Or something to say and not say, in the case of the post-ironic
Idk man if im being honest. Based on reading books from the 20th century i thought all of this bohemia stuff was going to be about drinking wine and getting a little gay, not doing so much blow our hearts explode + styling some sort of costume contest themed to clinical misanthropy. Half the time this shit feels like an experiment in what culture would be if there was no art or literature and if people didn’t love each other.
What contemporary literary cultures like this one seem to be doing is to invert the hierarchy. Writer first. Audience second. Subject third, or beside the point.