The Pains of Fame

I arrived a little too early to “the first party of summer,” as one downtown starlet later dubbed it. Copies of the Whitney Review (TWR) were stacked high by a reception desk, and deejay Skype Williams, installed in one corner of a gallery on Wooster Street (a pop-up of the Los Angeles gallery SPY Projects was then in residence), didn’t seem to mind playing to a mostly empty room. Premixed cosmos and canned espresso martinis had been set out in anticipation of more partygoers. It wasn’t long before the space filled up with a who’s who of Dimes Square literati and Canadians who moved to Berlin who moved to New York. Whitney Mallett, founding editor of TWR, a newish literary magazine with a knack for institutional trolling (the name has been known to confuse readers into thinking it’s an imprint of the Whitney Museum of American Art), navigated the scene with a genial hostess-with-the-mostess magnetism. A phalanx of disposable cameras—no need to pay a real photographer—had been dispatched to party gatekeepers like Pin-Up publisher Felix Burrichter, who snapped a photo of me, perhaps out of pity, after Skype suggested I’m “famous.” In hindsight, I’m 75 percent sure he had mistaken me for Steven Phillips-Horst, my coconspirator on the long-running Gawker/Interview column Talk Hole, who was not in attendance. From an analysis of the photos that eventually made their way online, I didn’t make the cut.