No Candy For You

I was really looking forward to that Candy Magazine party last night, because they work with some artists who I think are pretty cool, and I like the whole concept of the magazine, or so I thought. It was co sponsored by Opening Ceremony, and supposedly hosted by the Candy magazine cover stars, Chloe Sevigny and Terry Richardson. Now, I should have stopped there, but I'm a big fan of Le Tigre and MEN and I wanted to see JD Samson do her DJ set. So I RSVPED for the party (which was at the Monster) and got there at 11. I waited in a long line and watched everybody in the line (mostly white gay boys, a couple femme'd out fashion girls) get in.

When I got to the front of the line, the girl with clipboard, Michelle, told me that although I had RSVPed, the function was a private party, and I could not be accommodated. She waved in four people from the sidewalk ahead of me. They were only letting in people from the guest list, and even then, she kept repeating "bold names only". I reiterated that I had RSVPed, it was, you know, just after 11pm (really early) and I was by myself. Michelle told me that 1200 people had RSVPed and I could not be accomodated. No "we're at capacity". No "maybe come back in an hour". No "sorry". Nada.

I don't know why, but it really bummed me out. Sure, I've been to parties where I couldn't get in, because I wasn't dressed cool enough, or didn't look sexy enough, or didn't have enough friends. I get that. It happens in NYC. This really bummed me out, though, because I was really excited to see who else wanted to come out for this magazine party. I thought it would be easy to get in, maybe there'd be a cover or something. But no, it was a private party. It was like being in the Meatpacking district. I don't know why they didn't just have the party at a big nightclub like that. It was exactly the same bourgeois bullshit you see uptown. This is culture tourism.

Eventually my friend Gio came up and encouraged me to get back in line with him to get in. He faced the same problem with Michelle, but after two seconds of asking, they let our party in.

So, okay: the party sucked.

I was expecting to see the other 1,199 people who RSVPed, the ones with names bolder than mine, the ones who could be accommodated. I thought the party would be packed. I would say it was crowded. It was a total let-down. It was mostly full of straight people. Some girls. About a handful of people who seemed to be Dressing Up in Gender-Play clothing, which was nice. It was like a Drag-themed bar party. It occurrs to me that maybe the whole point of the evening was to cash in on the "zany!" way queer and trans people appear. Like, "Whoa how crazy Chloe Sevigny in s MOUSTACHE! Whoa!" A little hokey. Maybe I was hoping for too much. Does James Franco on yet another magazine cover, this time in lipstick! really contribute anything to the discourse? Does culture need this? It becomes less about playing with gender than about a consolidation of power. It's boring, and it's exactly the same as the other magazines you can get at the supermarket. Except you can't get it at the supermarket, it's really expensive, you have to buy it from Opening Ceremony, and you're not allowed to go to the party. This isn't for you.

Maybe culture needs magazines like this, scenes like this, as a stepping-stone to actual progress. The whole event/night seemed to be more about the gaze of normative, white, binary-gendered people towards "other". It's about the experience of seeing someone who is glittery and perhaps in drag or somehow a caricature of femininity and "fabulous!" It's about watching, not about being or speaking or learning or listening.

I am thinking of the line in that Bikini Kill song where Tobi Vail sings "I read it in a fanzine it wasn't even in a big dumb glossy magazine." I want for alternative culture to be better. I want there to be a space for people, maybe isolated queer and trans kids, to get access to the art that inspires them, and not be shut out because they're not famous enough.

The first DJ was playing Daft Punk's "Around the World". It's 2011. I did not just get read to filth by a snobby Door Person In An Ugly Borrowed Mary Katrantzou Knockoff for one precious hour so I could come down to a basement and listen to this song, again. Robyn did a brief two-song performance. The crowd went wild. I watched a guy get his face bashed in by a pair of coked-up clubkids, and when my friend tried to get the victim out of the mosh pit, everyone flipped out because they didn't want their Robyn Experience interrupted by having to make way for a poor soul who was bleeding form the face. The bouncers evidently didn't care, as long as all the violence happened in the basement, where the cops couldn't see it.