These past two weeks have brought forth a "new party line" on Dash Snow, a whole mess of revisioning eulogy. Folks who clearly would have said last month that he was a scourge and a dummy are now, post-overdose, calling him a genius. Most of these non-journalisms are stuffed with doughy quotes from his dealer (art, not smack), a certain Javier Peres, who, though a friend, also stands to make some money off of being baroque-sentimental and celebrating the whole "oeuvre" of the L.E.S. of aughts. I've avoided posting any responses here (other than my admittedly callous, clipped posts on the day Dash's death was announced--see somewhere below...or don't). But Saturday I went shopping in Midtown and then I went to Williamsburg. I bought a pair of sandals at Barney's and I spent a few minutes sitting in front of the glorified flophouse I briefly called home with my deadbeat love of 2005, E__, a friend of Dash's. This summer, I've had these odd "relived days," generally and specifically. I have a feeling of old information, of recycling experience wherever I go. And then sometimes I'm doing it on purpose, killing an hour by going to the Frick and sitting in the conservatory like I always used to in 2004 and 5, when I needed to cool off and be Uptown and religious. Even that phrase, "killing an hour," is history, straight from a moment in which I thought time was fit to waste and kill (obviously these things still happen, but I'm sick with guilt over it).....so much is going on here.....it's getting tricky to be graceful...There's the reliving of things, which is a sure sign of a break-up, of an ENDING, a post-, a memory. Then there's the Uptown and Downtown and "early" (colonized) Brooklyn. I related to the geography of this city so differently a few years ago (before I'd ever set foot in my current Flatbush), and so did a lot of people. In the early aughts, Dash and his friends (a kind of massive, varied, sub-categorize-able crowd) were trying to squeeze the very last bit of juice out of that old up-down (high-low) dichotomy, which is so easy and fun (and defunct)*. Williamsburg played a role, because there were plenty who couldn't afford the L.E.S. and Chinatown. They built (colonized) a suburb with easy access to their end of Manhattan island and a series of amenities. And where did I come from? Technically, a dormitory, but I crashed with E__ in that weird maze of a place, full of partitions and milk crates, on Metropolitan and Roebling. I was one of a few outsiders making it into (or just sitting and observing) the inside. I was young: 19, 20. That was the point. I injected my youth and, of course, my ability to be impressed. And class. I wasn't just young. I was young with a good education and a little expendable cash (the most unexpected people warmed to me when they found out I went to Andover, and were warmer still when they learned I was kicked out--the old dichotomy, or 'Dash story'). This group of O.G. hipsters, who I was falling in (love) with, took pride in grit, but also had a stake in SUCCESS and GLAMOUR. Some (few), like Dash, came from the thin, blue air of 81st street (or 70s-art-royalty TriBeCa). Some, like the two Sevignys, came from very preppy and well-heeled, Darien. Some, like Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley, were skate kids from respectable Jersey commuter towns. Some, like E__, were really blue-collar, rough and tough and thick and from Upstate and the Middle. There were hep 'Euros,' like Dash's wife, Agathe, or the guys and girls of Asfour, who may or may not have been wealthy. It was hard to tell, but they were clearly glamorous. And, this being a New York story, there were bands and artists and djs and stylists and designers and a few models/actresses (no--ahem--writers). Whosoever was gaining notoriety was the subject of fawning and gossip (Dash). The first time I met Dash, he had just been explained to me by a girl I really didn't like, in the following way: "You don't know who he is? He's gorgeous and he's one of those Uptown kids. He lives in a huge mansion or something. Last week, we were doing a bump in my car on 15th street, just the two of us. And we made out. And then he just got out and ran off, toward 10th Avenue. I really want him to like me." He made himself rare. And he didn't have a cell phone. He was skittish and always fucked up. And just then, to me, he represented a seedier type of seedy. He was one of E__'s party friends who I hardly ever saw. So, I assumed (and did so correctly) that he came packing heroin and group sex, two items E__ worked diligently to keep me innocent of (with varying success). The thing about Dash's Polaroids is that I'd seen them before I saw them (each of us probably had). E__ made those kinds of pictures too, not consciously, diligently or artfully. Just because his friends used Polaroids, and occasionally when there was an Asian hooker in the room doing blow off of someone's dick a body felt the need to document it, all tinny and flash-flooded. Imagine my mortification, a nice girl from Memphis (ha)**, upon finding that picture on my boyfriend's bureau. E__ knew this. He had seen me start, seen me try fruitlessly to disguise my alarm at the tableaux he brought me before most night/mornings. Though I was between schools, these were my college years. I certainly had energy and a drive toward drugs and bars. I was thrilled to meet this sweet guy who had some famous friends and could get me and a bevy of my friends into whatever party or bar or club that we wanted and keep us in free booze and drugs. There was more to it after a while, because he was so kind and such a gentleman, more felicitous and thoughtful than any guy of mine before or since. But the longer we were together, the more ugly things I saw. There was an incredible distance between the dressing room where I tried on the new dress for the party/Pillow's apartment where we met to have champagne and KILL TIME/our arrival at the party/our getting high/our commandeering the dancefloor--and--our leaving the second or third late night bar for the first of one or several morning parties in semi-stranger's apartments/bringing the last stragglers home to blow lines for a few more hours before finally passing out en masse. Between 4:00 A.M. and the afternoon, in more intimate groupings, I became aware of the "culture" afoot. My boyfriend and his friends were drug addicts and alcoholics and they were older than me. Some had children and would attempt to make self-effacing jokes about it mid-binge. There was a violence about them, about the way they did drugs and the way they treated people, black people, Mexicans, women. In that world (at least the parts I saw of it), women were disposable, not the stars, not the artists (usually), but the flitting girlfriends/bartenders/whores. There was an air of 80s metal. The dudes had long hair and the feminine ideal was a stripper circa 1990 and people called things rock n' roll. Because of, and beyond, the Bush White House, it was an anti-intellectual moment. Dash (yes, we are returning to him), despite his pedigree, was a high school drop out. Whether or not people had finished high school or gone to art school or Columbia even, there was widespread disapproval of academics, institutions (disingenuously). This was tricky for me. I came from a family of academics. But I had been, on the whole, an academic failure. I could make the argument, in a personal way, for a disconnection between smarts and school. I learned a lot from E__'s crowd about the efficacy of my non-academic interests in popular music and clothes and television and gossip. But so often, as I travelled in my man's pocket, I'd survey a room and think: what am I doing here? I was being given a chance to rebel, to build a generation gap, to both mimic and reject my parental forebears, Downtown New Yorkers of the 60s and 70s, hippies (though those came back in style---apolitically), intellectuals. And I said no. I liked it better at home.

And Dash. He was one of those that was A-squad, cooler, tougher, scarier, junk-usinger, distanter, inscrutabler. I was around him only a handful of times. I heard a lot of noise. I knew his wife a bit better. I never knew this girlfriend who had his child. But I knew he made me uneasy. And I knew his artworks up and down as soon as I first saw them. It's all familiar. All a direct, guttery/al response to a time and place and way of seeing that I shared in (if briefly and not so totally). I know it's cloying and tiresome to have this discussion, to continually call upon words like scene and crowd and moment. But it's what was happening. It's all that mattered---social life, I mean---among these characters. In the gruesome*** Times piece on Sunday, there were a couple of quotes of import. An excerpt from an eulogizing email Ryan McGinley sent around to friends is so telling. What he has to say rings true. It is an accurate description, and also, in tone, incredibly indulgent and irritating:

"...irresponsible, reckless, carefree, wild, rich — we were just kids doing drugs and being bad, out at bars every night. Sniffing coke off toilet seats. Doing bumps off each others’ fists. Driving down one-way streets in Milan at 100 miles an hour blasting ‘I Did It My Way’ in a white van.”

This was followed shortly by a wonderfully succinct soundbite from the New Museum's Benjamin Godsill:

" [Dash's work] captures this period bracketed by the fall of the World Trade Center and the fall of the financial system.”

I know this. I know this first hand. I've spent the past couple of years scrambling to retell recent history, the arc of the empty-headed, existential aughts. But that's it. September 11, 2001-September 15, 2008. When E__ and I went on our first, official date (we'd known each other peripherally for a while), we walked from dinner on E. 7th to Ludlow, where we went to Max Fish and Dark Room. As we rounded the corner onto that cozy little block of bars (I did love it back then), E__ said, "Here we are. Ground zero." He was so hokily giving me "an education" (dirty word) in "the scene," and so flip-ly, referencing the rubble of the Twin Towers. Without thinking, E__ had admitted that the debauchery therein was a direct response to that certain hole in the ground further west and south (there was a very important acid trip soon after that involved an accidental arrival at the WTC, but that's another blah blah blah). In reviewing the old A.P. images of the Ground Zero rubble, a thing as unpleasant now as it was then, I see a hamster's nest. But art, and a lot else, contains meanings or sub-surfaces beneath surfaces. One mess is tremendously different from another. The oft racist and sexist scribblings on the walls, the drugs and vomit and giz and urine that covered Dash's mess installation, the party, the exclusive masturbatory masturbating event, all of that was dumb and ineffectual and hollow and boring. The ashes and cranes in the Battery. They're a crumbled America (you know I'm not overstating the matter). I don't want readers of his work to get so carried away. Dash Snow was a poet of an extraordinarily unpoetic Bohemia. The creative output of the naughts (my new new--new since I began writing this a MILLION hours ago--word for the people outlined above) was slim and dim. They looked better and dj'ed better than most, but that's...most of it. Acting busted in a boom (oy the explosions). Never trying to be grown-ups, making a case for their own...experience (existence)? Carelessly. Messily. Thoughtlessly. In a few more years, when I'm feeling more generous, I might say they shook up some heavy, pointless pedagogy, made it possible for us to live in the middle of High and Low (maybe not for the first time, but...) and take a break from the rigidity and neuroticism that had so defined New York-ness before. When I moved back here, last summer, I was long(ish) out of touch with E__ and the naughts. I wasn't coming back to reclaim a past thing. It was clear to me that something had crested. Ludlow was Greek Row. I've told this story before. P.M.C. said to me over burgers (dinner 2) at Le Parker Meridien that "friends" or "groups of friends," "crowds," in the sceney or collegiate sense did NOT matter anymore. I was devastated. I was so lonely and heartsick for Tennessee. I listened to the Kink's "See My Friends" over and over. I knew P.M.C. was correct. When Lehman Bros. toppled on September 15th, the two of us were downtown, answering some silly tickets at the Courthouse. A fellow traded me a Wall Street Journal for my Post and there they were: four angry, downturning red graphs, the future of futures, the end of aughts and naughts. How funny that we (imperial, I know) acted skeezy and collective when the market was up, when luxe and greed and bling were KING. When the Depression started a year ago (lord knows where it's going), all we wanted was green pastures and clean consciences and OURSELVES. And I get why Dash's suicide is getting so much attention. He always did do. And it was...a statement, a meaningful escape? Because, you know. But I'm not trying to pretend he produced good work. It's not the materials. I make Polaroids and save Post covers (who doesn't). It's the vapidity, the lack of dignity, the puerile antics, the "fuck the police for not letting me tag shit" and the doom and gloom (with no measure of gravity).


*Note, I refer to: Uptown:Downtown as High:Low, not the whole idea of High and Low, that would be silly.
**That "(ha)" was for Memphis, not for me...
***The death is outlined. The "scoop" of suicide revealed. We are given access to that hotel room, to the experience of the people who loved him watching paramedics beat his chest for an hour and a half. It's totally gross, inappropriate journalism.