I started an essay back in August about M. Crumps, Actors, Dimes Square - a bunch of shit out of the limelight right now. I'd just torrented PVT CHAT, starring Peter Vack and Julia Fox, and found it deliriously charming. I had just quit drinking and I was beginning to see just how kooky addiction looks from the outside, so the movie's depiction of gambling and porn addiction was centering. It helped me begin the process of understanding just how selfish I could be on the juice.
So I had this parasocial affinity for Vack and looked forward to seeing his next movie, Actors. The director, Vack's sister Betsey Brown did a ton of promo on Ion Pack and talked a bunch about sibling rivalry in art making and whatnot.
I had been following Crumps for a little while. He'd reviewed Leave Home, which one of my old skate buddies was reading. I liked his writing on Elliot Rodger on his old blog. He felt very old world - in that his newsletter wasn't about vaccine science or lesbians transitioning. The new world element was the thesis, drafted upon his moving to New York and going to shows. There's a fascist undercurrent in the scene, he says. I'm gonna get to the bottom of it. I don't remember what he predicted, but it is plainly obvious who is getting dark money and who is just believing in dead no-wave dreams.
During my first few weeks without booze, I was fixating on the idea that Dasha and them could be saved, that they deserved Crumps, but maybe didn't need him. Maybe they'd be fine for now, trying to clown him in the way only a lapsed theatre kid could. Trying to kill his character for the simple crime of being a critic, acting confounded that somebody from outside a scene would try to write about it.
I never finished that essay, because director of 2017’s 17-on-metacritic-flick Assholes Peter’s next movie had a scene that masqueraded as an Ion Pack party and whatever.
Something awful has happened to criticism in the last decade or so. Basically, everything exists to suck the next big thing's dick, and every publication not doing that goes under. This is present in movies, music, lit, and *gulp* video games. Ten years ago you at least have hipinion or /mu/ but even there if you said Art Angels sucked everyone'd kill you. And Grimes was doing fine then and she's doing fine now.
So if you're not published, and you're speaking ill on people who maybe aren't doing fine, these beautiful creators spending their dad's own money on cutting indie works, they're gonna come and try to kill you. How dare you cut down our newly budding bigot flower. How dare you call Curtis Yarvin gay. How dare you say these moronic parties we only go to because there's open bar are stupid.
Actors was gonna be the work. The proof that all these 30-something friends were doing something. And its team pretends that it can't be seen because of Crumplar and a single trans director. That it's canceled. So the scene at the moment is just the Ion guys and Anna K and Sean P McCarthy recounting awful-sounding parties on their respective podcasts. It's just Honor Levy, high on sobriety, saying poetry readings should have tabletop RPG elements. Without works for Crumps to sling shit at, it sounds like Chinatown is chockful of weird nerds. Where the coolest public figures in any room are a guy who works for the UN and Kendall's assistant.
I'll say this: a lot of the bands suck. Every time I listen to one that Laszlo isn't in I'm not fond of it at all. (Everything he touches is gold.) It doesn't matter if your jeans are period-accurate or you're a Tompkins dunion - the music has got to be good. You have to play venues in Brooklyn, which people actually go to.
Of course, also there's no good syncing anymore. There's no Maximo Park in Burnout 3 anymore. There's no Sleigh Bells slinking out of the alleycat afterparty in Premium Rush anymore. But I digress.
Rich kids don't know how to collaborate. They get together and make a physical newspaper no one can read. They burn through NYC's Adderall supply writing chapbooks about smoking cigarettes.
The hate builds character. Make them work for it. Make them turn their crying and screaming that you said their shit sucked into making better things.