3/21/2023 0 Comments Watch spiral![]() Writing about “Dimes Square” is what people in and around it often do. The scene has also come to be associated with, and indeed has been created by, relentless self-mythologizing. You write your autofiction about yourself and others write their fictions about you, often anonymously, on Substacks, subreddits, messageboards Culture is changing, rolling on as it always does. ![]() It’s a reflection of what’s also happening elsewhere. I don’t think it represents an opposition to progressive values but rather a wish to retreat from a culture in which everything is supposed to be political. It has come to be associated with a certain attitude: boredom with performative outrage and disdain for overbearingly earnest didacticism. “Dimes Square” however is also a metonym for a wider Downtown scene made up of many different, overlapping scenes. Although it is redundant to make a reality show about this place because it’s a reality show already, every day. The wonderland of queer beauty, sexual exploration and everyone just supporting one another, even while modeling, shown in the Dimes Square reality show The Come Up is not so far from reality. The real square is not the reactionary hellmouth it’s often painted as, not some bleak vision of a broken America without Brooklyn’s calming influence, but more like a liberal dream, a very friendly and diverse place where everyone gets along. In Dimes Deli on Monday afternoon, where I was reading my hundreds of pages of Dimes Square think pieces and comments boards for this column, the barista there, Bernard, who is also a model and a lapsed art historian, told me, “It’s the best place in America.” It has a great sense of community he said. Its most famous faces are probably Meetka Otto, a musician and writer who’s also a barmaid at Dimes, and Ivan Berko, a DJ and a longstanding barman at Clandestino. It’s one of the few shared public spaces in Manhattan, a triangle of happiness and a sort of paradise, a village square populated by service workers and babysitters who are also artists and sometimes intellectuals. Nobody much agrees on what these words refer to.įirst of all I’d say it’s a place: a small pedestrianized piazza in Chinatown and the few blocks around it bustling with cafés, bars and restaurants, and a leafy park of children’s playgrounds. “It’s not a square, by the way,” the Dimes Square (2022) playwright Matthew Gasda agrees, “it’s a feeling.” It’s but a rumor. In his Baffler essay “Escape from Dimes Square,” Will Harrison notes that “‘Dimes Square’ signifies a bit more than it used to, looming larger in the city’s imagination, having become a concept, a chimera, a state of mind.” He’s right, although also very naive. Sam, comment on “ My Own Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual” by Mike Crumplar With that in mind, now that I know about this stuff, I can honestly say I wish my suicide attempt had been successful, or that, at the very least, I was still living with my parents, my mind so dulled by anti-psychotics that I was incapable of understanding any of it.” I worked really hard, got a grip on my mental health – I’m happy to say I live on my own and am in a stable relationship. After a long time in the hospital, I moved in with my parents and worked food service jobs and in call centers. Instead, I had multiple psychotic breaks, and then I tried to kill myself. When I was in my early twenties, I nursed vague dreams of moving to New York and becoming a writer of some kind. If the last fifty years has taught us anything, cultural transgression of any kind is now impossible under capitalism … I believe it was John Dolan who said good art can be honest or something genuinely new. There will still be MasterCard commercials, too, but they probably won’t feature gay interracial couples anymore. ![]() “If fascism comes to America, we’ll watch on TV like we do everything else. Dimes Square it’s art but it’s about more (or less) than art: it’s life turned into theater, or rather “autofiction” in the real world, belle époque in the age of Substack. Is it so distant from all our other forms of identity obsession? A concept, a state of mind, a hated and mythologized chimera, or just a real place where everyone gets along.
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