What does culture look like?

Antonoff and Dimes Square, etc

I got a new tattoo last week at an airy 4th floor studio that looked out across Williamsburg like something straight out of a set from Girls. My tattoo artist Anaïs is maybe 24, from New Jersey, and just a gem of a human being, all smiling encouragement and curiosity.

As I was flipping through her flash book, she told me she was getting tattooed later that day by a visiting artist and she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to get. A few hours later on Instagram, I saw her with a massive, geometric design centered around a heart on her lower back, a game of chutes and ladders etched in her skin.

We chatted while she put some of her sketch work into my left thigh (leg tattoos hurt) and she asked what I did. “I’m a writer,” I said, and sheepishly rattled off the practiced list of places that I care about writing for. If Anaïs shrugged she would have drilled a wayward scribble into my quad, so instead she just gave me the pitying “oh, that’s interesting” that I’ve heard from so many people over the years.

It is good to be reminded every so often that things you think are cool and interesting might as well not exist to other people. Not everyone knows about that Reformation dress or what was said on Blackbird Spyplane or what’s going on in Formula 1. And because our filter bubbles are pretty securely attached to our eyeballs, it can be jarring when someone is unfamiliar or ambivalent with something that is a critical part of your modern experience.

All this is to say that Jack Antonoff’s interview with English music magazine The Face had me thinking about what culture actually looks like.

Antonoff is right and wrong here for reasons I find interesting. He’s absolutely correct that Dimes Square as a locus of culture is both overblown and without any sort of real output. There’s been a parade of people on Twitter ostensibly wondering what the hell Dimes Square even is, which underlines how myopic the New York media class (hello!) can be. The scene is artistic vaporware, its most notable yield a pair of podcasts are either boring or racist or both and made for disaffected upper middle class kids.

So why does it capture the attention of so many leisure class folks who were desperate to turn it into the next installment in New York’s downtown cultural epic? The simplest explanation is because we all hang out down there. It has a collection of decent bars and restaurants and isn’t as claustrophobic as the Lower East Side or fratty as the East Village. You can have a nice evening at Le Dive and Clandestino and still be in bed by 11pm, the official bedtime of media people age 32 and up.

There are also, like, maybe 30 people who could conceivably describe themselves as being part of the Dimes Square community. I agree with Antonoff: there are no Dimes Square bands or Dimes Square artists or Dimes Square writers, something that could related to the average rent for a 1-bedroom in the neighborhood ($4000.) (Please don’t mention Byline to me, Byline feels like what would happen if an NYU junior had started Inverse.) Its most cohesive form is a sort of reactionary contrarianism, which has been a traditional refuge for people who aren’t very talented or desperately want attention. John Ganz tackles this better than I can in a newsletter from earlier this year that quotes from the Philip G. Nord book The Politics of Resentment:

But ok, dumb politics and a lack of talent aside, where I think Antonoff comes up short is related to him pointing at Dimes Square and saying “where is the art?” When you position a community’s value by its “export,” you’re always going to end up lowering or elevating that scene’s influence based on whether it’s producing things that are recognizable to you. Antonoff’s reference points here being excellent indie rock records of a certain vintage—though him saying "first few” Strokes records means he specifically liked First Impressions of the Earth?—tell you what he considers important and where his blind spots are, both of which are important when we’re talking about an influential cultural figure. (Just as an aside here: Antonoff as a specific vector of this sort of perspective is especially interesting mostly because his entire schtick is making inoffensive pop. There is no signature Antonoff sound which is why I think so many auteurs like working with him, he can be a cipher for their own work.)

Whether or not Dimes Square has created anything of specific cultural import isn’t germane to the conversation around its value as a community. You don’t need to see culture in order for it to exist, especially because we’re often stuck in walled gardens trying to peep through the hedges.

The bigger question for me is whether Dimes Square is even a community to begin with, which, I mean, no, it isn’t. And that’s where I think Antonoff is missing the point. To him, arts communities look more the cultural daisy chain of downtown NYC from Lou Reed to Julian Casablancas. Each of those movements had centers you could made sense of because they had looked basically the same for 50 years, moving a few blocks east or south or even hopping the East River. Dimes Square looks like a community because it has a geographical heart, you can go and visit it. But that’s where the similarities start and stop.

I’ll also go one step further and say that, much like ancient Mayans or Heaven’s Gate, New Yorkers of a certain type desperately want to live through a specific sort of end times. Dimes Square being the last breath of downtown culture means that you were there when New York finally ended, witness to the death of the cool. If you’re sure there’s nothing interesting going on then you’re not missing anything.

As you can tell, my own perspective on this is sort of muddled. We’ve been asked to reckon with Dimes Square as a mature cultural ferment even though it isn’t one, so we’re sort of starting from the wrong step anyway. But the much larger question that this entire discourse comes wrapped in is: Who cares anyway? It feels like the discourse is centered around this tiny stretch of bars and restaurants because it’s a form that feels familiar, it looks like what we’ve seen before and people are desperate for something recognizable in a vacuum of actual community. Cultural communities are more disperse and even (gasp) happening in ways that you don’t totally understand or appreciate, like not on Twitter. Remember, for every person who wants to talk about Dimes Square (me) there are thousands who have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s a good thing to keep in mind.

Some music

I’ve been Sufjan pilled once again

Some clothing

I know how to ride a horse and shoot a shotgun so I’m allowed to wear this and it’s not cosplay okay?!