I’m not a New Yorker.
In fact, I’ve spent close to 20 years living in and covering—and, in my own small ways, shaping—LA’s humming underground. Through my reading series Casual Encountersz, my biennial Made In helLA, and my conceptual print tabloid On The Rag, I’ve tried to create the artistic world I want to inhabit. So, when my flight lands at JFK on June 6, I’m curious to take in New York’s equivalent, and historically legendary, underground. Does it still exist? If I hit enough openings, readings, and performances, can I find the city’s offbeat pulse? This diary records that attempt.
It’s also a testament to my survival of a six-week bender, which began back when “Knicks in four” was the mantra in the People’s Republic of Mamdanistan. I went out every single night until 3 a.m.
By June 13, “Knicks in five” is the catchphrase, and it’s hot as hell, the entire city on edge as everyone preps to watch what would be the last game of the NBA finals. Hopping on the subway, I head to the Mutt Art Review Issue Four launch party. I arrive at an abandoned office building in Crown Heights that’s been taken over by The Gallery, a nomadic curatorial project conceived by Florian Meisenberg. Artists have been invited to install work in the empty offices of a shuttered WeWork in a show titled “WeWork (oralmoral).” Mutt fans mingle among the irreverent group exhibition featuring established New York artists like Josh Kline, Austin Lee, and Marcus Jahmal, as well as many up-and-comers.
Wandering through the show, inside a space that once heralded the long-since-discredited “sharing economy,” the artworks, intentionally or not, comment on the hubris and greed inherent in start-up culture. I enjoy Vijay Masharani’s eerie surveillance-video performance Facade Rotary Sequence, 2025, for which the artist filmed himself walking through San Francisco’s “Billionaire Row” at night, but I’m most drawn to Michael Egan’s darkly comedic painting The Whale to Live, 2025. Installed to overlook the building’s former kitchen, the cramped yellow canvas features a wryly smiling gray whale. It seems hemmed in, not so dissimilar from New York’s many artists, writers, and gallerists.
The Gallery is the ideal place to celebrate a print-only project like Mutt: Both the venue and the magazine confront, in unique ways, the entangled crises of real estate, economic precarity, art, and criticism. The Gallery rejects the terms dictated by mega-galleries and casino-like fairs, while Mutt’s independent, print-only ethos breaks free of the clickbait, algorithmic gulag.
“Mutt is literature on art,” Mutt editor and founder Kara Kazanoff explains just before the readings begin. “We mix criticism with more experimental fiction and poetry about art.” The magazine is both classy and DIY, like a boutique zine. The opulent design elevates essays by Matilda Lin Berke and reviews of New York shows by critics like Kimberlean Donis and Margaret Kross. Conceptually, it plays with publishing models, and shifts—in small but significant ways—how readers experience not only criticism, but art itself. After the readings, everyone rolls leftover WeWork office chairs into a larger gallery to watch the Knicks roar back, winning the championship in the game’s final seconds. The room, like rooms all across New York that night, erupts.
A few nights later, I walk over to “Less Is More,” a night of “performance art” staged inside the East Village French restaurant Ella Funt. A bouncer checks my ID as I enter into what seems like a nightclub: pulsing music, flashing lights. Writer-director Booth McGowan, who curated the program, zips around the bar, corralling performers and shushing audiences, all while apologizing to the restaurant’s pissed-off manager. Performances happen throughout the night—most of them trading in the cheap allures of youth and flesh. Sex sells, of course, but stripping off your clothes and smearing birthday cake on your face doesn’t always make for an insightful performance.
The night takes a more poetic, interesting turn when violist Georges Mefleh and cellist Aliya Ultan perform Violin Soup, a work examining the many ways we perform ourselves. As Ultan interprets Bach, Mefleh appears in the kitchen’s window dressed as a chef preparing a soup. They pick up various utensils and play their electric viola, eventually using a knife to chop the instrument into the broth (symbolically, of course). The work references Martha Rosler’s 1975 performance-based video Semiotics of the Kitchen, which illuminates female rage and gender indoctrination; the artist likewise putting utensils to absurd use. As Mefleh and Ultan’s playing grows distorted and chaotic, artist James Fisher-Smith, also dressed as a chef, tastes the soup and serves it to artist Viera Meepz, who, upon drinking it, coughs up a viola string.
The following week, I see another performance, though technically, it’s a reading headlined by controversial, born-again Christian social media starlet Victoria ‘Woah Vicky’ Rose. I cram into the Lower East Side menswear boutique le PÈRE for an evening with a rolodex of Dimes Square niche micro-celebrities: gadfly and Substacker Mike Crumplar, scene photographer Matthew Weinberger, and I Love LA star True Whitaker among them. Some legit writers read their work, but in 2026 New York—whether in the mainstream or the underground—spectacle is king, and few understand its power like Scammer author Caroline Calloway, who has danced along the razor’s edge of literature, scandal, and grift for more than a decade. Tonight, she claims to have translated the Latin elegies of Sulpicia. And though Calloway reminds the audience she’s fluent in not only Latin, but also in Greek and Italian, it’s unclear if she brought to life new translations or merely cooked the poems up from scratch.
The next reader, badboy poet Alex Dimitrov, quips that Calloway is “more interested in the performance of being a writer than being a writer.” And I agree—but in her case, that’s not a bad thing; she’s nothing if not a vulnerable, entertaining performer. Dimitrov himself lives to provoke, and adds: “Like Vicky, I’m also opposed to gay marriage.” Hecklers erupt, objecting that it’s Pride. Dimitrov fires back: “What? You want a land acknowledgement next? Sorry, I am that faggot.” Personally, I love Dimitrov’s combative style, as well as his poems, though he, Calloway, and the others are all appetizers before the evening’s main course. Woah Vicky is a white 26-year-old from Atlanta infamous for speaking in what Crumplar has coined a “blaccent.” Here’s a sampling of Woah Vicky’s tweets: “Tired of calling u my baby can we make one” and “You ain’t gotta lie to me Baby ion trust you anyways” and, perhaps most searchingly, “Am I a poet?”
Why would an Atlanta shitposter want to read poetry? It’s a question I’m curious to answer as I curate many readings myself, and am always chasing after the high of a Woah Vicky-type stomping into the playgrounds of the potty-trained “coastal elite.” To many cheers, Vicky takes the mic and reads through a telephone book of printed poems: “All the guys just want to smash, some of them be gay.” She speaks in such a sincere, earnest drawl that the work comes off as raw and refreshing. Maybe I’m naive, but I think Vicky’s the most honest of the writers here; her work and delivery free from the corrosive irony that poisons so much of today’s literary culture. It’s tempting to assume someone is cynically exploiting Vicky by dragging her to NYC to read in front of the literary world, but I think that’s inaccurate. Anyone—even a Georgian shitposter—can write poetry, and Vicky proves it. As bouncers clear everyone out, I manage to interview her, and ask what inspires her poetry. Her answer couldn’t be clearer: “God.”
Though I helped spark the reading-series inferno in LA, it’s sadly been on the wane. Not so here in New York, where I can easily satisfy my sometimes masochistic appetite for literary events. While few are as sensational as Vicky’s, some highlights of my reading bender include the series Magic 8, basically a queer, Gen Z talent show led by writer Peyton Gatewood. I’m always touched that the tender-queer poetry scene invites me, of all people, to read at their events. It’s Bushwick-coded and held at Pine Box Rock Shop. Weird Fucks is louche and seedy, frequented by clouted downtown types, led by photographer Nick Dove and writer Danielle Chelosky (usually in Manhattan, but when I read, it was at Seventh Heaven in Williamsburg). Patio is for serious writers trying to ink book deals, usually held at the Taix of New York, TJ Barnes in FiDi, and hosted by writers Bronwen Lam and David Dufour. I didn’t read at their event at Nightclub 101, but it was lit af.
The visual-art equivalent to such unruly line-ups is, of course, the group show, and plenty of them open soon after my arrival. They embody a more urgent, anarchic energy than typical “school year” gallery programming, which makes them so fun. At Canada, the loosely nature-themed exhibition “Plants, Animals, and Sky,” featuring dozens of artists, overflows with colors and abundance. In contrast, Gladstone’s “The Vandals” (organized by Alissa Bennett and Julian Ehrlich) feels darker and Victorian, with works like Adam Alessi’s beguiling canvas The Studio—an image of an artist daubing at a landscape—commenting on the thankless nature of painting itself. My favorite group show, however, is “In a Free State” curated by Salman Toor and Doron Langberg at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca space. Artist Ellery Neon’s Getting Free, a painting of two cartoonishly muscled masc creatures ass fucking, welcomes viewers into a show that’s examining freedom—political, artistic, and obviously sexual—in all its manifestations.
As June wears on and an oppressive heatwave settles over New York, I stop by Sebastian Gladstone’s opening of Cosima zu Knyphausen’s “Gute Nacht,” a show of bright, surreal, and macabre paintings. I’m not saying the gallery is part of New York’s underground; it’s not. But it taps into an exhilarating positivity that feels, in an art world stuck in an economic, artistic, and spiritual malaise, strangely transgressive. In the artist’s canvases, skeletons parade around lavish, imperial settings: ballrooms, thrones, salons. Though the imagery orbits death, zu Knyphausen layers it into vibrant psychedelia that’s very much about the mystery of being alive.
After the opening, Sebastian and others walk through Tribeca and wind up at Time Again, a Canal Street bar at the mouth of the Manhattan Bridge that’s infamous for exploding into block parties with downtown’s glitterati drinking bodega beers and doing coke on the street. Sebastian and gallerist Tara Downs have rented the back room, which, in this heat, doubles as a sauna with everyone crowded around tables on blue plastic stools. While drinking from sweating bottles of rosé and eating pillowy slices of prosciutto, I catch up with writers Sarah Velk and Kennedy Wright. I met the two back in LA, when they’d hang around Casual Encountersz. The pair have since moved to New York and launched Punisher, a reading series that mixes e-girls, legit authors, and party kids who’ve probably rarely read at all. They invite me to read at their event the following week at the Soho gallery Pietro Alexander. Naturally, I jump at the opportunity.
The next afternoon, I head to Chelsea to meet dealer Tif Sigfrids to check out a performance by artist Xin Liu. NOAA: A Fall Towards Home unfolds in an amphitheater built into the High Line and includes video, dancers, and sculptures. In the didactic and tedious piece, the performers move in an uninspired, modern-dance style that, to most observers, probably evokes suburban karate classes more than Simone Forti. I’m baffled why otherwise intelligent curators elevate dance that not only feels like a grant application come to life, but seems entitled to the audience’s attention, as if we couldn’t all be staring into the abyss of our phones or watching good dance or talking to our friends, which is what I do when I call it quits and find Tif to admire New York’s skyline.
Tif is probably the only art dealer on earth who was a teenage runaway, a high school dropout, and hid out in an Athens, Georgia, squat while on the run. I’ve always appreciated her outré, often punk takes on the art world, which seem informed by how she hustled her way into a milieu dominated by the trust-funded aristocracy. We head for drinks with glamorous New Yorker writer Alexis Okeowo and art advisor Robyn Siegel, Tif’s frequent collaborator. Over martinis, Tif and Robyn talk vaguely about a new project. Like many dealers and artists I meet in New York, seem fed up with the industry’s fatalism.
“We can’t give too many details,” Tif tells me, though I assume her new project, like all her projects—experimental films, galleries inside desks, her conceptual art “alt-weekly” newspaper Umm…—will possess an insurrectionary spirit. “Let’s just say we want to respond to the art world’s desperation.”
Many disagree, but I adore readings in galleries. Sure, they’re cramped, lit like psychiatric hospitals, and the sound is terrible, but I like placing literature directly in conversation with art. When done well, it can shock both mediums to life in surprising and unforeseen ways. Also, the type of readings I like—the kind that Punisher and I both throw—often balloon into Dionysian parties, which, when staged in a gallery, changes the stakes: Some drunk poet could knock over a sculpture or ruin a painting. And the Punisher reading at Pietro Alexander, which happens on the steamy, final Sunday of June, flirts with danger. Pietro Alexander himself politely polices the crowd, asking the tattooed Zoomer guests to please avoid leaning against the work.
The show on view is Wedding Show, which doubled as the set for Alexander and his new bride Sara Apple’s wedding the night the gallery opened in May. It features an array of LA and New York artists like Tallulah Dirnfeld, Ken Price, and Jaxon Demme (who introduced the couple). This backdrop of love and commitment contrasts deliciously with Punisher’s theme for the night: It’s the launch of writer Allie Rowbottom’s novel LoversXXX, which unfolds in LA’s 1980s porn industry. Along with her husband, cult author and Cash 4 Gold editor Jon Lindsey, Rowbottom plays host, hawking copies of the book and greeting the other readers, including novelist and Forever Magazine co-founder Anika Jade Levy, Byline founder Gutes Guterman (of Drunken Canal fame), and Gagosian publicist Sasha Rosenberg, who moonlights as the feared door girl at Gosh, Chinatown’s newest (and most difficult to enter) nightclub. I too am excited to read, and decide to write something new, sort of an homage to LA’s underground, a world that in New York, I feel a strange nostalgia for after a month away.
But not that nostalgic.
Despite everyone complaining about the rent, the heat, and the rats, New York still has a frothy zeitgeist, fueled by colorful bohemians and interesting artists. (I imagine, in part, Mayor Mamdani has something to do with the positivity permeating the city, a hope that he can at least start to solve the affordability crisis.) A certain razored quality seems to thread everything together, though it’s unclear to me if this is an effect of the various scenes’ output, or if I’m just sensing a raw ambition that New Yorkers must cultivate to survive.
And that, perhaps, is the biggest difference I find between LA and NY’s undergrounds: The stakes are lower and the ambitions humbler. LA’s art, and especially its literary community, remain distant from the real centers of power; here, always prowling the edges of New York’s readings, parties and openings are powerful gallerists, curators, agents and editors—players who could transform the life of any one of the city’s creative aspirants in profound ways. Or, as LA-born and New York-based writer Zoey Greenwald explains it to me on the final night of my New York bender, on the balcony of Russian Samovar on 52nd Street: “The strivers in New York are pseudo-intellectuals,” she says. “Whereas the strivers in LA at least have the decency to be dumb.”
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