a grammar

prrr, halls of mirrors, and why it’s good to just stay home

last night i went to a party for “The World’s Perfect Zine,” which is a zine that was just put out by a guy called “David Shapiro,” but who is actually named something else. a zine is like a self-made magazine. the party was at a downtown record store called Other Music, and it was sponsored by Tumblr, because David Shapiro writes a well-known Tumblr called “pitchfork reviews reviews,” on which he used to post comments, every day, on the five record reviews featured on the music website Pitchfork. for a while, people read the blog to see his commentary on what pitchfork said, because it was good commentary, and often funny, and really earnestly engaged with the records and the writing Shapiro was talking about. then gradually he started writing more pieces that weren’t just commentary on pitchfork, and more people read them (because they were good — this is all just about a year and a half ago, by the way), and they moved away from just being “thoughts on music” and toward more personal narratives about shapiro and his relationship with music and also about nightlife, narratives about things he went and did. a lot of them were about what it was like to go to cool shows, or attend parties where there were well-known people, or DJ the kinds of events where people feel like they need to hire someone to DJ. usually he would say he was “brought” to the party by a friend with a media job, and then he would write from the position of an amused or nervous outsider watching what people did in these environments, or trying to get them to answer questions about music. the parties and events got noticeably more high-powered as the site grew. shapiro started writing the same sorts of things for a great website called the awl, and the awl filed them under the category “nightlife reporting.”

shapiro’s stuff was always good at capturing feeling and also much better written than lots of people wanted to admit, with really tight structures and running themes of use of little dramatic images, though that stuff was hidden by having a very strong voice that acted more unkempt and run-on and personal. this blog post is written in a vague imitation or affectionate parody of the voice in question, but i’m not really committing to making it a great imitation, because the point is not really to be “funny” or just make an obvious joke. it’s meant to be mildly depressing. the main fixation of the writing, all along, was the main thing that most young new yorkers tend to get obsessive about, which is basically status. you know that there are certain people in the city who do things you find “cool” and might want to do yourself, like maybe playing in bands or working in media, and you know they’re walking around you, or drinking at the same bars as you, and when you are young you cannot really tell if you will ever slide across into their circle, whatever it may be, and become one of those people, or what you have to do to get there, or what it would be like anyway. shapiro’s writing had a close eye for that set of concerns, as is probably natural when you are a young person thinking about what it’s like to stand at a party with famous or hip people or models or whatever, but is maybe more special when you’re just at an exclusive Yeah Yeah Yeahs gig and thinking about the people who work the door, and who they are, and what their place is in the whole realm of status and power and cultural capital and so on. there was a really interesting period when i think Shapiro’s writing was sort of equally about music and status at the same time, which i liked, and then it became more just about the social part, and then eventually he stopped writing as much online because someone hired him to write a film, which he told me at the party is set to begin shooting soon.

also there was one time he got a lot of press for writing about driving a van in the president’s motorcade, which was funny because that is obviously about a certain kind of inside/outside access and status, too.

his zine, which i haven’t read yet, has contributions from people in bands (jj, Vampire Weekend, Das Racist, Cloud Nothings) and writers like Tao Lin and Choire Sicha from the Awl, and Lena Dunham, who is a filmmaker people always rave about. Tao Lin is a writer who is really a personality and popular with people on the internet. he was at the party, and it was weird because standing in a room with him just makes you feel like you are online. he was supposed to DJ at the event, as was Victor Vasquez from Das Racist, but it was very crowded so i couldn’t really see who was doing what, in music terms. there was a lot of jj playing, though.

at one point i was talking to Shapiro and saw that Jenna Wortham, who is a well-liked writer for the times, had just walked in, and since she was also supposed to DJ i figured Shapiro would want to stop talking to me and greet her. but he had just been talking about Lena Dunham, so i accidentally told him “hey, there’s Lena,” and he corrected me and said “Jenna,” which i am deploying here as a symbolic moment where it probably appeared that he was way more naturally tapped in to Who’s Who than i am, which he totally is, it is not even really a question. i don’t really know people or stuff, and enjoy staying home. i am from the midwest, and miss just sitting around people’s houses not needing to know who anyone is. but i did put on a nice suit when the magazine i work for had an actually fancy reception for Frank Rich, who is actually important.

this was right after a friend of Shapiro’s came over and said that the event was running out of wine, and it was time for someone to go get the bourbon that was coming next, but he (the friend) couldn’t do it because of something having to do with the illuminati, so could Shapiro do it? and that seemed like a weird thing to ask when the event was sort of in Shapiro’s “honor,” or at least launching his zine, so he kind of laughed and i think suggested another person who might be able to go move the bourbon.

for a while Jenna Wortham was talking to Jenna Sauers, who is also named Jenna and is a fantastic writer from new zealand. i met her once a few years ago, when she was writing about modeling as the unnamed “anonymous model” on the website jezebel — it was at a jezebel-related meetup, and she was extraordinarily good at pretending to officially not be “the anonymous model,” even though it was super-obvious that she was. but she was really good at pretending not to be, even graciously participating in conversations about how the anonymous model was a really great writer, with the subtext obviously being that i was complimenting her work and she had to accept the compliment indirectly. now she writes things for jezebel under her own name that are way better written than you would ever expect from that blog, which is not really about beautiful writing. anyway, i mention her because judging by her twitter feed she goes to a lot of stuff. when i got home i was looking at twitter and saw that she must have headed straight from Shapiro’s zine thing to an after party for the national book awards, because she was tweeting about things overheard there.

after the event at other music was over, i went with some friends from tumblr to what someone said was a “twitter bar,” meaning i guess that people who work for twitter hang out there, and then after that i went with a friend who makes an indie show for MTV to a noodle bar that had nearly 4,000 yelp reviews, per what her phone told me. we had noodles and talked about Carles, who writes the blog Hipster Runoff and is a friend of hers, and about whether we’re good at networking. (she is, i’m not.) sometimes i think about Carles and Shapiro together because i think they demonstrate something about how people like reading about music in new formats with new concerns, and with the kinds of strong voices that traditional reading-about-music places like reviews websites and magazines can’t get away with, or at least don’t ever try to get away with. they’re also both concerned with status, though for Carles it’s more like the status and “relevance” of people’s taste, mostly online, whereas Shapiro is in New York and more boots-on-the-ground as far as people’s actual status.

once Shapiro was Brought by a friend to a literary event and talked to Tom Wolfe about music, which given the way i read and enjoyed Shapiro’s stuff seemed like it should have been this huge moment where all the mirrors in the room shattered, or something. Tom Wolfe is a famous New York journalist and novelist who was really concerned with social status, and used the word “status” to refer to it, and would talk a lot about how that was the big thing that was interesting and mattered and was important to observe when writing about modern life.

i always liked that Shapiro wrote about status, and often managed to do it in a sidelong way that didn’t make people get all upset and say “hey man this should be about MUSIC,” as if music doesn’t ever have to do with status. (status isn’t just about people feeling more important or cooler than other people, it can also sometimes illuminate stuff about how things work and what people’s aspirations are.) his zine party was full of NYU kids, partly because it was near NYU, partly because that’s who goes to launch parties for the zines of people with popular Tumblr blogs, but also — i like to think — because NYU is like the #1 school for undergrads walking around in this intense proximity to people and things they might think are cool, and constantly working on figuring out how to insert themselves into these scenes of coolness or status, and actually having the potential to do so. (i mean, it is a college in downtown manhattan.) i spent a lot of time thinking back to a time when i might have stressed out over wearing something cool to go to a little zine party where the most “notable” people were mostly just non-famous writers who sit home blogging all day. i also spent a lot of time there imagining Shapiro writing about himself. not like the personal narratives he writes sometimes, but like if he were an NYU kid at this party and how he might describe himself as “David Shapiro, this guy who started this blog, and he is wearing a red sweatshirt and has cool glasses that are sort of clear but peach-toned, and i ask him if he ever reads pitchfork, and he says not anymore, because he’s pretty busy working on other projects,” or something along those lines. it seems less workable now for him to write from some status-eying outsider’s perspective now, like “i am awkwardly reporting back to my peers from this status-oriented space, plus also intriguing people within that space with my fresh outside viewpoint,” because it turns out that if you have a good eye for certain types of status and also desire them, you can easily wind up getting them. of course, the kind of status we’re talking about here is super-meaningless, and basically just equates to having a low- or medium-paying job where people might know or like your work by name. so i worry sometimes that the internet has totally exploded this old situation where if you knew someone’s name or followed their work, it meant slightly more about their level of achievement, because now people are fascinated by the “insider” quality of others who are fairly ordinary and do not possess nearly the importance some might think they do. you probably know what i mean with that. there is a weirdness to it that can make a body start getting awfully mentally midwestern and weirded out.

when i started talking to Shapiro he said something like “don’t worry, i’m not going to write about this,” which was a joke he was making involving a couple things. one is that when he started reviewing pitchfork reviews, people who wrote for pitchfork weren’t sure whether they should talk to him or what they should say, but then everyone learned he was a generally normal, fair, and decent guy who was actually writing great stuff, so everything was cool. another is that he was once invited to a Shabbat party with a bunch of New York media people, and then he wrote a piece for the awl about what it was like to be at a Shabbat party observing what these media people and writers and bloggers and such were like together, which i guess some people found offputting or weird, to be invited to a private dinner but then write about it like that. but of course what was funny was that OF COURSE he wasn’t going to write about anything i said to him. because he wasn’t at my party, i was at his. and he still writes about going to things, now and then, for the awl, tagged as “nightlife reporting,” and this is a low bar but it’s more pleasant to read than most everything anyone might describe as nightlife reporting (except maybe when Molly Young did that sort of thing for Details), but it’s no longer as driven by whatever sharp or ambivalent fascination with inside and outside and status that used to be there, it’s just good writing in Shapiro’s style that contains some run of the mill social anxiety or embarrassment over stuff like reintroducing yourself to Tavi Gevinson, the 15-year-old fashion blogger, who you met once in the VIP area of a music festival but you’re not sure if she remembers you or not.