A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

IdleRich said:

Shoreditch is an area of East London near Old St tube that was supposed to be the centre of cool artists and whatever from late 90s for the next ten years or so.
The narrative goes that despite being central it was cheap and empty with loads of warehouses and lofts etc a load of artists moved there and used to drink at a pub called Bricklayers Arms and then other places opened to cater for artists and then hipsters went there - enjoying the frisson of mixing with artists on the one hand and salt of the earth working class cockneys on the other, not to mention petty criminals and gangsters who had all worked for the Krays back in the day (they were from there and had huge traditional funerals when they died attended by minor edgy celebrities and locals who all swore that the Krays had loved their mum) and more and more places opened and then average Londoners went there and more mainstream places opened and eventually it was made entirely of clubs, bars, restaurants etc and you had busloads of lads and lasses piling into them from Essex and elsewhere.
Interestingly the first time I went to Russia I DJ-d in a super cool (or at least super expensive and glam) bar in Moscow which was underneath a designer clothes shop. The bar was named Oldditch as a kind of portmanteau of Old Street and Shoreditch and I remember being driven round by one of the promoters who would point out trendily/stupidly dressed Russians and ask me if they had managed to correctly pull off the style of a London hipster.

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Serena comes running up, all overbite for a second, and cops to having looked all over for them. She introduces herself to Jenny, who does a little overbite of her own upon being spoken to by the Serena van der Woodsen. Like all Humphreys, her filter is broken just long enough for her to pull the "oh, I know who you are" boner for our benefit, so we realize how very famous and charismatic Serena apparently is.

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Puffing on a Juul to stave off pre-event jitters, Rabbit White purrs, “I became a poet because I was experiencing ego death from sugaring too much.” (Sugaring is the verb form of “sugar baby.”)

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I sidle up to author Tony Tulathimutte downstairs, dressed normally. “This is the conjunction of eight different micro-niche literary-world types, right?” he says, as a means of hello. “I just saw the Chapo guys over there.”

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Caroline and Natalie are out. Rachel Rabbit White's glitter-and-Lucite filled "Porn Carnival" is in!

This week in "What's Agitating Everyone On New York Media Twitter" news, Kaitlin Phillips' colorful dispatch from a sex-positive lit (as in literature but, also as in "lit") party in Bushwick, celebrating the launch of a new book of poems by writer, activist, and glamazon sex worker, Rachel Rabbit White, has fueled some debate.

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Walker interviews White

Walker served as an army medic during the Iraq War, and by the time he returned home he had been on over 250 combat missions and developed PTSD and depression, for which he turned to heroin to cope. The drug habit led to a life of crime, which led to a stint in jail. He began writing his first novel, the semi-autobiographical Cherry, while serving an eleven-year prison sentence for a series of bank robberies in the Cleveland area committed in a four-month span. It soon became an unexpected phenomenon (“we were thinking maybe 1000 copies would be sold,” he remembers. The actual number is 100,000 copes in print.) and earned several accolades, including a nomination for the PEN/Hemingway Award. As a form of penance, Walker used proceeds from the book to pay back the banks he robbed.

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