Now’s Your Chance to Learn to Read at Peter Vack’s Sillyboy Release Party Hosted by Cash 4 Gold Books and Forever Magazine
OR Bravo’s The Real Nepo Babies of Downtown New York OR The Elis Burrau of Dimes Square by Allie Rowbottom.
(EDITOR’S NOTE. This text presents the release party of Peter Vack’s debut novel “Sillyboy” now available in your local bookstore. Thank you Allie for your time, your eyes, ears and your expertise - Albin Trotte Duvkär, editor at BABO-magasin.)
In the elevator two girls in crop tops can’t believe they’re going to a book party. “I don’t read,” one tells me. “I never learned.” Now’s your chance, I say and the doors split open. It’s ten pm and already the smoke machines are on, fuming, and the fog they fart smells like maple syrup. Everyone is saying so.
Everyone is saying this place is so cool. They’ve never been here before but soon it’ll be the spot and then it’ll be over. Gonzo’s has a big living room and dank carpet, red lights and a long hallway from which three small rooms diverge, each one full of pleather couches. The first room is subdued. Some of the many hosts on Peter’s flyer congregate there, for the purpose of vaping and respite. Through the smoke I spy Brad Phillips and Cristine Brache, fresh off the performance she directed several weeks ago, an adaptation of her poetry collection, Goodnight Sweet Thing, which featured a star-studded cast (among them, another guest at this party, Betsey Brown) Jell-O wrestling before a sold-out crowd. Cristine looks stunning tonight in black leather, her long hair tossed to the side, her eyes rimmed in kohl.
The second room is reserved for Bravo TV, which has sent a film crew and about ten producers. They arrived early to set up, bearing fluorescent bulbs they affixed to the ceiling with giant metal clamps. And playlists of unlicensed music to cue in any space Bravo cast members occupy. On tablets linked to Spotify they demonstrated how fast the songs could switch from recognizable and expensive, to canned and free, wordless yet tense, the soundtrack of conflict brewing, like the noise of gathering rain clouds, the sirens before the storm.
It rained earlier, torrentially. Now the sky is clear, but humidity lingers. Outside the line stretches around the block and Anika Levy of Forever Magazine and I go down to pluck VIPs, which feels like mercy and a manly sort of power, the power of choice. We pull friends from the wet, real world, into the air conditioning. We ride the elevator back upstairs, emerge with our bangs curled and frizzy, our foreheads glistening with sweat.
Initially I had been hopeful that Bravo would interview me. I could plug my novels (and mention Sillyboy and Cash 4 Gold Books as well, of course). A banner beneath my image would identify me as an “author” and probably include my age, because some things can’t be helped. This could be my break, I thought, which is what I always think around cameras, why I’m not sure; I wouldn’t really want to be on a reality show, it’s simply a habitual response. I once auditioned, at Peter Vack’s request, to be in his movie RachelOrmont.com. I found the process of making the tapes thrilling, truly, but in the end, Chloe Cherry got the role.
“I’m a big fan,” I tell one Bravo producer when we shake hands. “Great,” he says and nothing more. Another producer whispers that the show they are filming is “top secret” but it’s actually a fully announced, fully realized project about “young creatives” making it in Manhattan. Several cast members are the children of celebrities. Nepo babies, in common parlance.
The Real Nepo Babies of Downtown New York are all but absent from the Sillyboy by Peter Vack release party, however, cordoned in the middle room, door shut, filming, fighting, the stormy sound of unlicensed music barely audible from without.
Oh well, it’s the book we’ve gathered to celebrate, and that’s available in the third room. Forever Mag has sent interns to man the merch table. They are lovely and try their best, but the demand is overwhelming, and in the shuffle, some copies go unpaid for. Cost of doing business. It’s within this third room that I talk with Zans Brody Kahn and Bronwen Lam about the joys of novel writing and the sadness of losing pets. Just this morning I had awoken in tears from a dream in which my newly deceased French Bulldog, Butter, appeared me to as if still living. So the conversation, full of commiseration, soothes me.
We disperse and I make for the bathroom line, which is long. Partygoers enter one of two stalls in packs and once inside spend whole minutes fiddling with their dime bags, so the queue is sluggish. Neoliberal Hell is here and says she wishes she’d gotten Botox at the Aesthetica launch. But her skin is immaculate and I hope she holds off as long as she can.
Back in the main room a girl on the dance floor paints Peter’s portrait in sloppy watercolor. Doesn’t she know Caroline Calloway was doing party portraits four years ago? Maybe she does know, a conscious copycat, her self-aware self-image built by memes and mimesis, not unlike the downtown scene itself. If she doesn’t know that is also how the scene works: every summer a fresh load of barely legals disembark the LIR or the plane from Palo Alto, with the twinkle of coke and clout in their eyes. People say LA has no memory, but such is also true of NYC nightlife.
Now it’s eleven and the dance floor is packed, willowy bodies writhing, compelled by The Crowdsurfers (Gutes Guterman and Ali Royals, DJs). Peter still hasn’t read and maybe he won’t. I lean against the back wall with Jon Lindsey, author of Body High (aka Kroppen), and editor at Cash 4 Gold, the publisher of Sillyboy. Also, he’s my husband. I spot photographer Matthew Weinberger and call him over. He says, “Do I look different?” and we say, no! But he does look different because he just got new eyeglasses. “Now you’re less Terry Richardson than Richard Kern,” someone says. He takes pictures of me and Jon. In one shot, we kiss.
Marcus Maddox is also in attendance with his camera but throughout the night I begin to suspect that he’s wilfully avoiding taking my picture and because I am vain and self-involved enough to think he’s thinking about me at all, and because as previously stated I am drawn to cameras, this irks me. I would have hoped my body of work meant I still had clout, which is the only thing more photogenic than youth in the scene. In most scenes, frankly. Alas, like I said, this scene has no memory; my own book party was well over a year ago and since then, I’ve been writing, not partying, and most clout requires the labor of constant maintenance via regular appearances—irl but more importantly, on Instagram–at specific cool-coded events. For better or worse I would rather write a book.
Now it’s midnight and Peter still hasn’t read. Someone finds him, asks if he wants to. He does. But the crowd in the main room is cranky and reluctant to quiet down. They don’t want to stop dancing, and this is a book party? No one told them. Anika introduces Jon and Harris Lahti, writer, co-editor and partner (along with Nathan Dragon, attending in spirit) in Cash 4 Gold,
which she calls the “most exciting and ambitious new press out there.” In my completely unbiased opinion, it’s true. The first time Anika met Peter, she adds, was at the now infamous fascist humiliation ritual. “I still haven’t forgiven him for making me relive my bat mitzvah,” she says but the crowd is so unruly they miss the cue to laugh.
Jon gets up next and yells into the microphone, introducing Peter as we’ve never seen him before: Peter Vack the novelist. Peter takes the mic. He isn’t sure he can do it he says but from the outskirts of the crowd, loyal literary enthusiasts chant his name, which seems to bolster him. Though this is a party in celebration of Sillyboy, a novel, Peter has decided to read poetry, dedicated to his late friend Trevor Bazile. He wishes Bravo would emerge from the second room to film him, “But we’re feuding” he says.
The poem is titled:
Cinema OR The Blank Film Festival OR Dark Bravo TV Peter Vack’s Poem Lore OR “Quote” My Own Dimes Square Reality Television Initiation Ritual OR Kanye Voice It was a Jewish Book Launch OR Micro-celebrity Death Match Bravo TV Edition OR The Bravo TV Edition of Peter Vack’s Poem OR The Real Orbiters of Dimes Square OR This Poem is Also Dedicated to Sillyboy a Novel by Peter Vack Cash 4 Gold Books Summer of Freud the Sillyboy Gets Cucked Section OR I Am the Best Actor of my Generation Number 2.
“It was Harold Ross’s policy, when he was editor of The New Yorker, never to run a poem he did not understand,” wrote Dwight Garner in a recent review of another downtown figurehead’s debut book and though it is questionable whether Ross or Garner would understand Peter’s poetry, it is possible that the poetry he reads tonight accomplishes something more important than intelligibility. Peter the poet like Peter the novelist is an aggregator of his own less tangible artworks, his memes, yes, but also the language they’ve created, a tongue so specific that comprehending it is perhaps the ultimate arbiter of downtown clout, the creation of clout itself an artform Peter has mastered. In the poem he name-checks -cellectuals accounts and Cicero, says he went challengers mode with The Dare and calls himself the Elis Burrau of Dimes Square;
“no put me back I was a spoiled brat fascist who clout chased his way to a book deal, no put me back I was the geriatric millennial Dick Van Dyke,
no put me back I was about to rage bait to get me some likes,”
he picks up speed, scrolling verses, references that vary in degrees of familiarity and niche, each one piling atop the next, until the poem is over. There’s some confusion about how to start the music again and where the USB cord might have wandered. But Curtis Everett Pawley and KJ Rothweiler of The Ion Pack come to the rescue, and in no time, the dancing has resumed.
Now it’s well past one and I’m sitting on a couch in the third room with Jon, Harris and Tristan Depew, who tells us Body High is the only book he’s ever read in his entire life. The guys are sharing nips of Fireball. Earlier in the night Tristan had asked Harris for gum and Harris, fresh out of fresh sticks, had given him a piece right out of his own mouth. It used to be that there was only one book party a year, Tristan says. “Like your book,” he says to Jon. “Or
your book,” he says to me. Now there’s too many book parties and sometimes it feels like people write books just to throw them. We should be harder on books and we should be harder on parties, Tristan suggests and advocates for party reports that criticize rather than name drop and praise. But I’m no critic. I’m a shower not a teller. I’m a novelist, like Peter Vack.
