killing denouement

Or, how to create pastiches in which Downtown New York feels collectively better about itself. Rejuvinates its art scene in sperm smeared increments and poloroid flashes? Just like gentrification! Dash Snow! Yeah, progress to exclamatory/ejaculatory punctuation now. I really do want to like him for his work and not just the persona and the collateral Dash Snow Effect. Or the whole Dash as Samo as Another Four Letter Appendage business. Maybe it’s a microcosmic contemporary version of Andy Warhol and his whole downtown Factory scene? I do really dig a lot of the latter’s work though.

So I looked around some more. These Cass Bird photographs from the NYMag article that started it allare nice. They tint his life happy much in the way that etsy craftifies and cutifies the internet. Others do it better though. I checked out his collages from an exhibit at the Berlin CFA too. They’re pretty okay, and perhaps even surprisingly restrained.

But then again, Dash Snow really likes the blow. As he explained to PAPER,

I’m not a businessman. [But] my business used to be and still is thievery, to some extent. I came across a camera, which I thieved when I was 16 and started taking pictures. I’ve been partying for years, probably since I was 11. I did my first line of coke when I was 13 years old and I’ve been partying every night and taking pictures ever since. Everything’s a blur and every night is New Year’s as far as I’m concerned. [When I'm at a party, I look for] a dark corner, a wallet, a bag of blow and some love to go.

What then? Perhaps the not-so-faint suspicion that he parties a lot harder than you ever have or will? And that you must thus live out your nightlife vicariously through him; removed and slightly bemused. Kind of like US-Weekly fare for the hipster highbrow. What I like best from him, then is this sans-(so much)-excess slightly sparser photo. Like the kids who flock to New York wanting to be Kerouac all over again and enroll at Columbia wanting to drink weeknight poetry at the West End only to find that it’s already shut down with a Havana Central in its place. Then they get tired and sleepy and bitter, and maybe develop a taste for the bitters too. As the note scrawled on the wall of the Hungarian Pastry Shop roughly reads, “take heed, he died early of an alcohol related disease and he lived with his mother”.”

Also: an exclusive? studio tour and more things that smell in New York that aren’t new money or greasy pizza or nasty-cheap cologne.