at the irl store

How to get to new york, part nine

taken @ the gush magazine release party by darya with my camera

welcome back to How to get to new york, a newsletter in which i try not to participate in too many substack trends because i’m so exhausted all the time lol

The wind outside wraps around the buildings like a happy hug, like an apology for all the well wishers who wondered if the city would be a place for them. 

The motor of culture is dissatisfaction. It always has been. Nothing new under the sun, under the wind, under the stars. Nothing new under any of it. You wouldn’t believe it. And under the circle-k sign we returned walking up lincoln avenue from delilah’s, a place inside which i had once been told was the place where curt cobain met courtney love in the early 1990s, and ofc this was very much not the case but i think it speaks well to what kind of bar delilah’s is. That’s to say, the bartenders play good music.

Outside we saw people smoking as we left around 2am and we walked back to the circle-k to hunt up cigs for ourselves, w ended up with a pack of camel crushes for twenty dollars (way too much for cigarettes but oh well), and smoked outside sopping in the august nighttime,—august and september are the best months to smoke a cigarette,—i’ve been off cigs for a couple weeks now, but friday night was was a nice break from that sobriety. Pure bliss for a moment or two.

The store manager, an old curmudgeon who’s always there, cracking amusing albeit very much problematic one-liners at the checkout counter, walked out of the store with a customer in tow, locked the door behind him, the bulletproof glass rattling as he twisted the lock, and showed a customer in a red tracksuit scratching his head in bewilderment where the bathroom was behind the building, marked MEN. I couldn’t see any other bathroom. Red tracksuit customer exclaims in surprise.

On his way back from this little excursion, keys rattling in his hand, the store manager said “y’ello” to the three of us smoking, looked considerately into our eyes and he swung a little on his long legs to stop and talk with us, bouncing slightly on his feet. Balding with white hair and bright blue eyes, probably in his late sixties or early seventies, the store manager naturally began talking politics, how the rich are pulling the strings in this country, in this election, and we all nodded, yes, yes, and then he went on to explain how mark zuckerberg was going to personally drive into blue states with hundreds of ballots to keep them blue.

Matthias, my friend, to placate the pause that came after this little tirade, said “classic, duffel bag of ballots.” Another pause.

The store manager continued, saying the socialist authoritarians like kamala harris want open borders, demand open borders; that america is a boat on the ocean and you can’t let just anyone on board, you can’t just let the drawbridge down for anyone; that america is jonah’s great big raft and the rest of the world is drowning in its own filth; and at this point i began to get uncomfortable and i didn’t say anything but sadly puff puffed on my cigarette until he went away but i couldn’t help think what a sad thing, what an incredibly dour way of looking at the world. America, a boat? Absolutely the hell not. Absolutely the hell not. 

Walking towards rosati’s afterwards, i explained with my head down, still kinda bummed, how depressing his boat comment had been. If we want to get into the real problem here the old man was referring to, well it’s the united states’ government with its history of playing whack-a-mole against any leftist political leader in latin and south america. Eli laughed. “Like what does he even think socialism is?” he said.

“Yeah do they think everything will belong to the state? Everything already basically does.” 

also taken by darya @ the gush mag event

I had attended the gush magazine release party in humboldt earlier in the night with my friend robert who i hadn’t seen since 2022 when he moved from madison to austin for a coding residency for a couple thousand dollars with no strings attached. He had been working on a homebrew music streaming alternative and this couple thousand ideally was the seed money for the project, which admittedly, sounds very cool. Unfortunately, though maybe not unexpectedly, the residency was swarming with twenty-something liberarian goons with technocrat fetishes and rehearsed jordan peterson one liners. Figures.

The peak of the (um) experience had been when the tech residency admin held a wine and cheese night in their last week to celebrate the screening of some conservative anti-woke film in austin and alex jones had showed up for some reason in person to drink free liquor and shake everyone’s hands, take pictures, hold a brief q-and-a. This was two days before he was ordered to pay 1.4 billion to the sandy hook families, funnily enough. The only other leftist at the tech residency wrote a substack piece about it (i can’t seem to find it, otherwise i would link it here), and according to robert the rest libertarian goons at the tech residency found out and the poor guy was made fun of relentlessly like they were all in high school again and he had shat his pants on the bus.

Existing out here as i do lanking around the city with a chronically dead and dying iphone 8, i jump on whatever plans present themselves to me because there’s only a small window to respond to texts when my phone’s always knocking on heaven’s door. so i end up at events like the gush magazine release party.

When we finally arrived at the gush irl event we paid the ten at the door and walked into a diy venue, into its back courtyard, rather devoid of anyone but four guys stapling magazines in a last minute frenzy and one exceptionally tall guy in a gush shirt selling magazines, shirts, button ups, skirts.

I heard about the magazine by running into the guy who owns the printer, and since he kept a copy of the first issue in his coat pocket i had a chance to look through the print layout in the dim neon lights outside cole’s. Fliers for the event had been floating around Logan Square for a couple weeks, and with a photo circulating on insta of MJ Lenderman holding up a copy of the magazine’s first issue, it felt reasonable to assume that most everyone in Chicago’s indie scene at the very least know the name. And besides, some friends of mine in a modestly successful shoegaze group had just returned from tour and would likely be there. 

They were, it was nice catching up.

And the party as a whole was a wonderful little event. I had lowkey expected the worst, that there would be the most aloof kind of indie musican snob there,—but at least i could profile them for this post, right?—but in the end it filled up with very cool, down to earth folks. Everyone was having a good time. My friend Darya arrived shortly after us (and whisper whisper she’s having an incredible graphic nonfiction book come out today, actually, on aesthetics and perception of bodies, you should check it out). And i think they sold lots of merch.

When you first open the magazine, flip past the table of contents, you get a full page spread of “what the fuck is gush?” and then five pages of gush’s team decked out in wraparound shades, wearing gush merch, posing for digital photographs.

That’s to say Gush is as much a fashion brand as it is a music magazine—perhaps it’s even more of a fashion magazine if we’re being honest here. And it is fashionable.

I don’t mean for this to come off as overly critical, i think gush very much knows what it is and how it exists in this odd new intersection between fashion brands and publishing that’s begun to form ever since kendall jenner posed on the front of a boat with a chelsea hodson essay collection,—it all works together as visual package,—but the actual product does leave one craving at least a small bit for something more long form and more in-depth, especially considering the legacy of music journalism.

That’s not to say it’s not a fun package, though. There’s a crossword at the end and the print layout’s impeccable, there’s a cd mixtape in the middle of the magazine and all of the songs are incredible deep cuts (it opens with Mid-Air Thief’s Crumbling Together, my song of the summer in 2020).

In this case the irl is the substance. The irl is the depth in a project like this.

And the irl is fashionable right now. It’s become a trend, but only a trend towards the physical and not towards any real depth. Gush is chasing what essentially was the balance that playboy magazine struck between its aestheticized lust and generally well-written articles by american cultural writers, only in this case with the aesthetics of indie sleeze and a handful of too-short interviews with a a couple of touring musicians.

I doubt gush would go as far as to say there’s any equivalence there between them and playboy, sure, but there is at the very least a common longing towards the past between playboy with its longing for the roaring twenties, and gush with its longing for the indie sleeze network of the 2000s and early 2010s. Everybody’s longing for that era, it seems, just look at The Dare’s atmospheric rise, you take good music and a symbolic tie (a literal tie, in fact!) towards the LCD soundsystem era of new york city underground, perhaps the last great era in the city before it became completely consumed by real estate speculators, and that you have it, yet another a hauntological success story in modern music¹.

At the close of the magazine there’s a spark, though,—and i want to clarify that i have quite a bit of hope for the gush project going forward. At the end of the issue there’s an editorial that makes for the substance of the issue almost entirely on its own; a short page lamenting fully the chicago DIY scene of the 2010s which has yet to truly and fully emerge back out from the sequestering of live events during the covid-19 pandemic. The editorial is an admonition towards its purpose, finally; a clearing card for the question of what is this magazine,—what the fuck is gush? answered.

What was once a network of dozens of house venues and bar venues with bills every other night has become a mere handful of spaces. All throughout chicago one can feel something similar, a great lack of third spaces. Walking up lincoln avenue, once once passes the rich person’s urban utopia that is Lincoln Park, the storefronts become massively bare, some still stitched up with plywood since the george floyd protests even. All over the city feels like this. But the emergence of the real does happen with time. Book Club, one of the newer underground venues, is hidden behind a private account on instagram in the same way its venue space is hidden behind the plywood nailed up over an old abandoned storefront, a nonbuilding made into a secret third space.

Gush, if anything, signals a longing towards that past. What green growth comes out of the ashes of the pandemic needs to be nurtured and coddled and a small part of me worries that such a pure, surface-level nostalgia towards the past tied up with feelings of loss about over what was will only hinder a project like gush when it ought to be looking more firmly into the future, attempting to dig up what’s emerging right now.

But that would be against the dictates of the market which demands a lack of depth. It’s been crushed out of us, any ability to publish or contribute deep communication with one another.

The cultural machine of music has been slowly dislodging the actual people and humanity behind it. All that’s left really of the once thriving american music media is a handful of music influencers. Bandcamp has been auctioned off for parts as was Pitchfork,—and don’t forget that these shuttering of curtains to where people can explore and establish taste is intentional, accomplished for a reason. Any increased expectations for artistic statements, actual culture behind the music we consume, is a threat to the flattening of music into entertainment to be easily monopolized by corporate interests.

Mark Fisher put it well when he said that the corporations have been fighting for decades to flatten culture into mere entertainment. They reduce our expectations so that they can easily commodify products. This explains the hauntological attachments we have to eras we’ve never known: the british invasion, the 80s club scenes, 90s grunge, all of it.

The machine takes and it diverts,—it is in the garden,—; the talismans carried with us, the safe shelters shielded from corporate eyes and data collection becomes subverted one by one and don’t you find yourself numbed in favor of some glittering nostalgia for a time you’ll never experience instead of anything new?—this remains by design, but it’s what i wanted from Gush, unfortunately, something looking forwards, ahead,—and you with your music you’re playing in your bedroom on that old acoustic guitar? Where do you aspire towards if not the 70s? If not the 90s? If not the indie sleeze of the 2000s?

But a third space is a third space. We need those.

also taken by darya

A return to irl is easy to write off as just another trend but that in itself is the make-or-break attitude i hold towards such a return: if the return to irl is in fact a trend, and we retreat back to the vivisection of the internet where people like the gas station manager lose themselves, have their ideologies dissected and rearranged in service of the elite, it’s a wash, a complete wash, we gained nothing; but if the return to irl sticks around, if we put our feet down in the real and relearn how to establish depth in objects and projects and packages, then there’s hope. It’s a rebellion we’re talking about. And in a way Gush is an object of rebellion. There’s no way possible for data trackers to get their hands on it. There’s no way possible for AI to learn from the layouts. It’s kept out of the machine’s shaking, authoritarian hands and in yours and mine.

Are you dissatisfied with existing online? Find something like the Gush magazine release party where you are, say hi and meet some people. Buy some merch! It might be a little surface-level, sure, but to build a tower of meaning in reality first you have to start on ground level.

This country is not an island. You’re not an island. I’m not an island. Think for a minute about how this digital landscape isolates you from other people. You are not your profile, in fact your profile is just an assigned avatar for you. You have no control over how they shuffle around your worldview. They’re actively trying to flatten everything around you so they can make you easier to sell to marketers. That’s their goal. And what does that make you into after thirty or forty years? I can’t imagine it would be much different from the gas station store manager ranting about how America’s this great big boat, alone on an ocean.

The state in America is not the government but the multinational corporations that have engineered a recursive system that keeps them in power. In this sense the state very much owns everything in this country only with the net of capital, a net that feels invisible if you don’t actively look for it. And that’s why everything’s become so flat, that’s the root cause here.

When all of the world is flat and featureless, when there’s no irl to exist, people like the tech libertarians described above, fawning over alex jones, go deeper and deeper into their crippling loneliness. That’s what it comes down to. It comes down to fear and dissatisfaction, and if dissatisfaction is the mechanism to culture, how does it work on entertainment? The steam blows off to culture war topics just as flat as the media franchises we’re up in arms about.

If the irl has any staying power, i’d hope that it could assuage such fears in people, such desperate coyness,—but then i begin to think about the price tag of the irl as a cultural term, how easy such a trend could be subverted into the most mundane, surface-level trite with an aesthetic package and a hefty price tag.

The other day i saw an instagram reel describing how everyone wants to be a DJ now because it gives one a right to exist in third spaces. The feeling is that one can either (1) be a producer of content to gain the mere right to exist there, (2) be an observer looking in from a phone screen at home, distanced, locked out to the level of the visual and audible, or (3) have enough money to afford a statement piece of an outfit to warrant the exposure, to warrant you being there. Let me tell you now that you can exist in any space you like no matter how glitzy it seemed and your presence will be appreciated as long as you’re not bumming too many cigs or hitting too many vapes. There’s a feeling with this return to the irl that one must produce or pay, one cannot exist in the new irl without a personal, aesthetic reason to be there. But no, you have space. That space you see in the screen in that aesthetically produced video of that DJ, that open spot on the dance floor: that’s for you.

A dream: i went to visit home in northern wisconsin and found the whole place different with the number of people there having increased and diversified dramatically, with new cars and new people and they still all love lefse and i remember looking out the window of my grandmother’s farm house and seeing blue water, being enchanted, after i say that all america needs is to be more interesting because the people here are bored, but the water was only in my own eyes and no one else’s. Later at a parade a shootout began and I ran and hid in a red-white-and-blue munitions store run by an older eastern european man.

Closing this piece out now with today:

One of the principal joys of a long walk to clear one’s head is the indiscreet act of watching what people are watching in their homes, on the second floor flat screens, as day settles into the evening into, finally, the blue velvet of the night.

today i powerwashed my brain with media and made an attempt to write something about gush and the return of irl media in nullified form that was not overly critical and at the very least honest,—an impossible task to be sure,—but with my headache growing steadily into a swirl not unlike that of a tropical storm i went out to put sandals to sidewalk and played the game of trying to figure out what shows people were watching, what movies, what news stations, on their wall mounted flat screens. unfortunately, each and every time i saw a screen in passing i couldn’t tell. i didn’t have a clue, nor did i recognize the actors at all. they all looked like the same kind of david harbour white guy. this being the first time this had happened, i felt a twinge of panic. all of these shows streaming looked absolutely identical. it’s as if i looked away for just a moment and the total flattening of streaming had happened like a tree falling in a forest, as if nobody was around to hear it. will this happen to music? has it already happened?

Anyways,

i hope you all have a wonderful week! I’ll be back next thursday for part ten, about my brief time working at Target in the loop and the horrors of corporate retail,—should be a fun time lol

xoxo,

briffin

1. An interesting topic: The Dare is certainly a hauntological LCD Soundsystem, what does that mean for music if it’s gone from cannibalizing trends from the 60s to those of just ten years ago so quickly. I’ll make an essay out of that at some point.