Scene Me Up

Harry on the good part about scenes

When i was a freshman in high school there was a group of guys two grades above me who called themselves “the octopussy”. There were 8 of them and they had an uncanny grasp of post-ironic swag for a bunch of 16-year-olds in 2011. One guy used to show one of his balls to people on the soccer bus. They all had beautiful girlfriends who would go on to go to Columbia or become doulas or both.

This was my first experience with a scene. Like all good scenes, I wanted to both drone strike this squad, and become a part of it. I can probably list off the entire taxonomy of the Octopussy extended universe.  By the time I was a junior in high school, my friend group too had a nickname.  

Some people hate scenes. 

There's been a lot of super interesting writing about scenes in the last 2 years. My sense is most of this has to do with Dime Square and downtown, but scenes are somewhat universal–comedy scenes, film scenes, frat scenes, etc.. The most informative work on scenes I’ve come across is Brad Troemel’s cloutbombing report. Another interesting piece was Daisy Alioto’s Dirt Piece Against Scenes from last year, and another was Eleanor Stern’s piece Against Sceneyness.

Alioto’s main point as i saw it was that writers are “uniquely susceptible to scenes when we should be skeptical of them”. Stern’s piece put forth the idea that there exists “a literature of sceneyness” with one of the common threads being homogeneity. Finally, Troemel argues that in the case of Dimes Square “anyone looking for the artistic meat of the scene, had to settle for the Beyond Alternative in the form of navel-gazing scene gossip and auto-fiction.” These pieces all had an idea in common: we should be highly dubious of the art, and the conversation around the art, coming out of these scenes.

Now…i basically either agree with all three of these takes or recuse myself from having an opinion. I can’t say if a Sovereign House adjacent book is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, i read 3 books a year, but the logic in favor of being highly skeptical tracks. I also think the sort of real-time hyper-loreification of a scene by scenesters is reserved for the corniest among them. 

But i want to briefly entertain a much sillier prism through which to view scenes. I want to talk about how scenes are cool and fun and horny. 

I think of scenes as very loose organizations of people associated with the creative process with a very loose but omnipotent hierarchy that can sometimes change from minute to minute.¹

The thing that makes people most uncomfortable about scenes socially, is how they subject everyone involved to think about their social standing. I’ve got bad news folks, that's what makes them cool. Yes, scenes put us in touch with this weird subterranean energy dominated by who has rizz and a strong jawline and devious eyes and lots of stock options and rich parents but the very fun and dynamic catch is that we get to choose how to engage with that energy. 

In the same way that there is something very thrilling about drinking the 5th beer, going to the 3rd location, and pushing oneself to the edge of toxicity, I think the same thing can be done with engaging in the superficiality of scenes. In other words, they’re fun in moderation…they’re really fun in moderation! Scenes offer the ability to microdose vanity. It is ok to pull up to time again and daydream about how cool it would be if a model who reads features in N+1 recognized you off the strength of your takes, get lost in that…and then just…go home. 

It's fun when socializing has stakes, isn’t it? Surely not all the time, or even most of the time. But 1 Saturday a month? Why not! 

A healthy, moderate dose of sceneyness can be a shot of electricity in the arm. If the goal of a night out is to either find love or riff your heart out (which is it is btw) then a shared language of microcelebrities, twitter speak and predictable david foster wallace takes is actually an awesome jumping off point. If one end of the spectrum is sitting at minute 22 of a first date asking the person across from you what living in East Williamsburg is like, a scene-soaked conversation in a bathroom line might be the other end. Perhaps said even more simply, it is such an incredible privilege to pull up to a party where there are 3 to 4 people you kind of know.

And how about this, I kinda like the idea that scenes have the ability to make you spin out and make mid art. It's fun to be in the presence of something that powerful. And how about THIS: most of the guys in the Octopussy…seem to be doing pretty good….

If there is a Real Point here it is that scenes crop up everywhere and yes we should be skeptical of them. If they are funded by strange dark money… we should be Very Skeptical of that (and honestly laugh because what the hell dude) But you are missing a huge huge huge part of the conversation around them when you forget that having a place in a dialed-in scene is really fun. 

1. Randa reminded me that these scenes don’t necessarily need to be creative or artistic. but I do think some matter of subjectivity of craft is important..like a crypto scene counts because of how stupidy speculative the whole thing is