Scene Report from Echo Park

Or, Ross Barkan and the Performative Bell Jar

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I’m used to getting places early, being part robot. The robot-transportation Mexicans work on an unpredictable schedule and often get delayed. Some people bite the drivers’ heads off about it. I just leave more time.

So, I show up early as usual on the Eastside for this latest February ‘scene’ party. Yes, the LA lit scene. A few people in LA do, by mistake, actually read, unlike Hollywood coordinators.

Midday Echo Park is calm, sunny, grimy. The robot-deployment dropship people drop me at Taix, an LA institution, a hundred-year-old French restaurant built like a huge, labyrinthine tudor lodge. It’s closing in a month to turn into condos. C’est la vie.

I’m five hours early, a record even for me, and the restaurant isn’t even open for the night yet. That’s fine. I planned on wandering, maybe doing a little work in a café. I poke around the thrift shops, the side streets, a time-travel-themed novelty shop that doesn’t seem to have a point per se. “So it’s a Meow Wolf type thing?” I ask the hopelessly nerdy Chinese girl behind the counter.

She’s deeply offended. “They actually copied us.” Her face says I might be intruding on her TikTok time.

I retreat to a semi-lesbian (many such cases) hipster bar where I once watched the Dodgers win the World Series in a screaming delirium. At this hour it’s quiet and posh. I get a happy hour drink and I make sure it’s well liquor because I currently have no money because my producers have been delaying and delaying my gainful writing employment on their sci-fi mishmash properties. The signs say laptops allowed until six at night. Good rule for life.

The establishments in Echo Park are swanky, but the infrastructure is decrepit. Streets are so worn they’re as bumpy as cobblestone. Lynchian trash piles cover moving forms of addicts at back kitchen steps. It’s like the government has given up. On the Taipei-to-Tijuana scale I’ve developed for cities in my travels, it’s 90% TJ, way worse than Los Angeles’ usual 70%. This is not my corner of LA. Never lived here, never worked here. I’m a local tourist.

Despite the apparent collapse of society, the young hot people are violently resisting the squalor simply by existing. There are grunge twinks with white tees and tattoos. There are a lot of women with their asses fully out, many making out with the twinks, and there are a lot of other women with tight buns or bobs stepping over bums to get to the liquor store. Everyone seems to either be on drugs or have done so many that they’re permanently partially vacant.

I roll into the party on the dot at six. I’m the first one there, other than a bowtied old reliable Mexican maître d’. The space we’ve been given is a small ballroom with a dance floor and a dozen wedding dinner style tables, white-clothed, with maybe sixty chairs in all. It’s a far cry from the house party mayhem of our hosts’ previous events.

It’s dead silent. Kind of weird. The bowtie man shuffles around. It’s impossible to imagine this place full of people under fifty. Ergo, it’s impossible to imagine this party being a success.

Evan from New Ritual Press shows up a second later. It’s their party. They’re putting out another angsty, horny, depressive book about the 2020s young male experience. Even though it’s not my night to shine, I still feel like I’m on the crew. My book is one of their four past releases on the merch table. I feel a kinship with the author of the moment, who’s currently nowhere to be seen. It’s like we’re on the same record label. We’re a gang.

Evan works with a diligent pace assembling a pyramid of copies of the new book. He’s fast and meticulous, and you can tell he’s a hardworking grip when he’s on set. G&E are like the NCOs of film. They’re not in it for pomp and they don’t fuck around.

A dad and his five blond tykes stumble in, maybe looking for the bathroom, maybe just perusing. I realize they don’t know what we are. “We, uh, we put out cool shit,” Evan explains. He’s tall and fit with short, puffy black hair, Greek-Mexican from Texas. He has a perpetual cherubic smile and a love of what’s good. “I really feel like we’re saving America,” he tells me, reflecting on the publishing company while the strangers linger. “Talking about people’s actual experience.”

He, Matt Pegas, and Dan Baltic at New Ritual are the only three people in publishing who have immediately championed my work without hesitation. I owe them a lot.

“Are you the author?” the dad asks me.

“No I’m not,” I tell him.

He ignores me thereafter.

I watch the kids check out the books. I’m not sure if I should intervene, since the new release has a naked woman’s back and tramp stamp on display, with her breast and nipple somehow also visible from the side in the corner of the image. It’s been heavily implied to me that this is a photo taken by the author, a narrative which presumably reinforces his bona fides as a pervert flâneur. No one will tell me the details. I think about how I’ve perpetually warned New Ritual to cover the nipples on their book jackets so they don’t get banned from Kindle. With their prior release, I successfully convinced them. This one, though, I did not see until it was done. They have not been banned thus far.

Evan has lit a candle and dialed the chandeliers down to the perfect moodiness. It’s a huge improvement. He has an eye for mise en scène. He wants to know if I think it would be dorky for him to wear a wizard hat he brought.

“It depends on how you carry yourself while you’re wearing it,” I tell him honestly.

He grins. “Oh, then I’m wearing it.” He knows he can carry himself well.

Evan connects to the room’s Bluetooth speakers. He’s trying not to be antsy that there’s no one here. “In an hour it will be packed, so enjoy the quiet,” I tell him, both to make him and myself believe it.

He starts playing oldies. “Don’t know much about geometry...” I softly sing along. I’ve been trying to sing more. Wait. Is it “geography”?

The venue has given us two extremely bored dedicated bartenders, and out of sympathy I say hello and order a glass of white wine. The guy tells me he’s in constant pain from two car accidents and he’s self-conscious about it because it’s not visible. Okay. The gal is a cute black girl from Michigan with a pixie cut drifting through life. She thinks she wants to be a doula ultimately, since she doesn’t want kids herself. She asks if I know what that is. I say yes. Come to think of it, I realize, no one in Echo Park seems like the type to ever want kids. There are stickers all over the light poles for mail order abortion pills. I wonder how many of the people I’ve seen today will have a living descendant in a hundred years.

I buy Evan a vodka soda, his drink of choice, to thank him for his hard work and also possibly console him over no one showing up. I forget to specify well vodka and Mr. Car Accident fucks me with a $17 Ketel One premium pour. I see emptiness in his eyes as he does it. I hate him. I still tip well.

Matt Pegas finally arrives just then with his Clark Kent glasses and blazer and runner’s build. This is the guy who inspired me to write “Hunters” after a long, lazy afternoon in the Valley. He’s one of the press’ founders. I trust him more than almost anyone I’ve met online.

The actual author of tonight’s book is with him, too. Michael Mages. He seems a little older than me. He has a weary, solid, young man’s face and a focused, watchful affect. He meets me very deliberately. “Cairo. I really liked your book,” he tells me. I tell him I’m looking forward to reading his.

Pegas is in a flurry of activity. He pulls rank on Evan and switches the speaker to his own phone, playing what we used to call New York alt and now call indie sleaze. He keeps walking to other rooms in the restaurant with his phone in his pocket and making Arctic Monkeys cut out in jarring bursts.

All-capser MR. OMAR KING shows up shortly after. He’s the bestseller author on the New Ritual roster. I’m not envious of his sales or the attention, but I am a little insecure that Matt wants to take him across the street to sell a bunch of his books to Stories, Echo Park’s mainstay bookstore. Should I be asking Matt to do stuff like that for me?

I had gone into Stories when I first pulled up that afternoon, to inquire about getting my book stocked there. I was inspired to see a Substacker I know, Jordan Castro, on prominent display. “Put it on Ingram so we can order it,” the staff told me of my own book. Another thing on my to-do list.

I felt rude inquiring without purchasing anything, so while I was there I decided to buy a book as a token of support. My first pick was East of Eden, which I’ve been meaning to read together with Katie Scruggs Galloway, but on closer inspection the cover had a big red Netflix N on the front and I hate Netflix hate Netflix hate hate hate Netflix. So I bought The Bell Jar instead, since I sincerely love it and I did not own a physical copy.

Sitting at the party, I realize it would be a funny joke to keep a brand new, untouched The Bell Jar prominently on my lap, face up. It’s the performative male bit ad absurdum, something from a starter pack. I commit.

The waiters start bringing a huge spread of food to the banquet tables. There’s bruschetta both with and without goat cheese. There’s a comical amount of cold rolled ham, maybe a whole Tao Lin pig’s worth. There’s a giant golden bowl of champagne punch, which makes me feel even more swindled for patronizing the bar. There are still maybe only five people here, even though a hundred RSVPed on Partiful. This is starting to get sad.

Then The DJ walks in. No, not the DJ of the event. This man is an honest-to-God college radio DJ with a weekly show up and down the West Coast where he plays a wacky character and spins deep cuts for a cult following of thousands. Like all of us in the scene, he has found his own tiny way to live like it’s still the 20th century. He is also insanely, mind bogglingly well-read and loves alt lit. We appreciate a loyal fan.

I realize in that moment I’ve given up on any other terms besides alt lit and ‘the scene’ for what this is. New Wave didn’t stick, possibly to Tooky's Mag’s pleasure. You have to go with the flow. Maybe in twenty years they’ll call us indie lit sleaze.

“Nice performative Sylvia Plath,” The DJ cracks. Nice. He gets it immediately. He hugs my upper half above my robot carapace as best he can. It’s nice to see him again.

I ask about his other half I’ve never met, whom he’s about to marry. “She’s at home,” he tells me. “She thinks this is a Klan rally,” he adds as a partial joke, and explains that’s because of John McDermott’s hoe-scaring Rolling Stone article on New Ritual’s “anti-woke” tendencies from last year.

We end up on the topic of gay rape fairly quickly, like one does. The DJ explains he believes gay rape is a key feature of scene books in our moment. Dragon Day, Nutcrankr. He’s not wrong. I don’t push him too hard to figure out why that may be, although it seems obvious to me.

Then something magic happens. I had predicted it, but I didn’t believe it. I look around and the place is full of people. Young people. Pretty, glamorous, hot people. Two-thirds women. This is the set that scene parties always attract, somehow, as unlikely as it sounds. I first encountered it at the The Free Press debate in 2023 where Grimes and Sarah Haider debated Anna Khachiyan and Louise Perry over whether the sexual revolution had failed. Call it the Red Scare adjacency effect. Everyone is elegant.

“Everyone finally showed up,” I tell The DJ with relief. “No one wanted to be first so they all tried to wait each other out.”

“It’s the defect-defect equilibrium,” the DJ smiles.

Matt Pegas grabs the mic and thanks everyone for coming and promises a quick reading, since everyone’s sick of long ones. A tall, blonde-bobbed woman in a green dress who’s friends with the author reads the book’s first two pages aloud into the microphone. The audio equipment is working well, for once. No e-girls are nearly exploded by propane tanks.

It’s weird hearing a misanthropic male character’s voice come out of this woman who has probably never lived the experience of bitter, testosterone-driven sexual frustration. I have a hard time telling if I would like the book, but I can tell it’s well done. Evan makes sure to stress to me, proudly, that it was he and not Matt who first pulled this novel from the submission stack cold. Matt explains how Michael’s cover letter comparing his work to Ottessa Moshfegh and Bret Easton Ellis was what first piqued the press’ attention.

The strangest part of the post-reading mingle is when I end up talking to the author’s mom. She’s cute. Straight white bob and a leather jacket. Fifties or so. She says she’s read the book three times and loves it, although she wishes the end was less dark.

I make my way back to The DJ to relay my anecdote. “Is that a little strange, for your mom to be so involved in your debauched manuscript?” I ask him. I keep my own mother away from my more bawdy work with regularity.

“No,” says The DJ. “I mean, my mom wrote romance novels. I never wanted to read them, though, because of all the...violent non-consensual sex.”

“I feel like that’s to my point,” I say back.

As the party gets crazier I’m trying not to run people over with my robot lower half. Around then, to my delight, I hear my name warmly called out. I immediately recognize the source as Henry Begler, a fellow Angeleno I have thus far only seen on Substack and video.

I wax poetic to The DJ about Henry being an astonishing essayist. I repeat a bit that I believe Lillian Wang Selonick originated about Henry’s literary essays being so good they destroy your interest in reading the reviewed book because he makes you feel like you already read them.

Henry came alone from work. He’s not a scene guy, and he only came because of my invitation. There’s a little pleasure in making him get his toes wet, in corrupting him. He tells me about a big-time traditional publisher that recently started cold-DM lovebomb glazing him, begging to collab, only to then jerk him around and ghost him. I try to reassure him he’s well-suited and beloved on Substack. He’s a sensitive young man. It’s hard for any of us to admit the institutions we worship from days gone by are now staffed by bozos, but it’s the truth.

I meander. Someone touches my arm. “Oh my God, I love Sylvia Plath.” I think she’s doing a bit but she is not doing a bit. The DJ has poured me a lot of punch by now. I’ve been trying to drink enough of the free stuff to bring my dollar cost average down from the bar tab. I’m faded-ish.

I laugh. “Me too.”

She’s a Southern European sort of blonde. That mix of West Coast slinky and yet not haughty that only comes from Arizona. Indeed, she’s Arizonan, and apparently my age. She explains she’s another friend of the author. She explains that he involved her because she has a lower back tattoo, and he was trying to get a collection of photos of women’s bare naked back tattoos to promote the book. I wonder if perhaps the book was secondary to that project. There are worse reasons to write a novel.

I learn and immediately forget her name. She brings me over to her friend, who looks like an early twenties Sophia Loren with jet black hair, so she can monologue to both of us about how she read The Bell Jar in high school and it was the perfect age for emotional impact, although it also probably made her a worse person.

Sophia Loren is quieter and sweeter than Arizona and seems less likely to cut me, although they’re both nice. She wants to know how fast I can go on my robot chassis. I tell her. She’s impressed that I’m 650 pounds in total, counting my borged out hardware, because I’m pretty slim. She asks me if there are safety features to prevent me from running someone over. I say absolutely not. She seems to like this. She tells me she’s glad I could run someone over for her if she needed me to.

“I wanna smoke,” Arizona pouts at Sophia, reclaiming her friend’s attention. I ask Arizona what she smokes and she says white Marlboros. Then she makes fun of me for liking American Spirits. She tells me they’re not actually healthier. I tell her I couldn’t give a fuck about that. I like the flavor and how long they take. It’s leisurely. It’s aristocratic. They invite me outside.

We go out through the side door to the street, the only door that can accommodate my Swedish-built high-powered combat frame. They smoke their Marlboros. I enjoy the smell secondhand. I’m not smoking these days. It started disagreeing with me. I was an old soul as a child and now at twenty-eight I’m just old.

At some point, we realize the door has latched behind us. Arizona offers to go around to the valet entrance and let us in from the other side. Sophia and I wait, and we wait, and we wait. She eventually knocks as hard as her knuckles will allow, then she kicks the door a few times with her heel. Then she gives up and turns back to me. She’s wearing some black Audrey Hepburn sort of dress and a huge white vintage fur. She tells me all about how she buys her clothes vintage. I say that’s pretty cool.

I don’t knock the door down. We just wait and entertain ourselves. After a long while, we realize Arizona has truly abandoned us. I escort Sophia around to the valet entrance, and then I go back to the combat-chassis accommodating door. In seconds, Sophia lets me back in to the party.

It’s well after nine o’clock, which is when our reservation for the room ended, but nobody is even attempting to kick us out. It seems like nobody cares. The place is closing in a month anyway. It’s kind of a last hurrah. I’m relieved to see the spread has been mostly eaten and replaced with dessert courses.

Pretty soon, Sophia and I realize that Arizona has been going around the whole restaurant, opening almost every door to try and find us. I guess she mixed up her sense of north, south, east, and west, and almost got kicked out for barging through the place. I look around for my actual friends, but they’re all busy. I settle back in at an empty table with my new acquaintances.

We talk a long time. Well, really, they talk and I listen. Arizona has a text from a guy named Philip saying they met on Raya. She doesn’t remember him. Probably not Phil Rot, but there’s a chance. She doesn’t want to reinstall Raya to figure out who he is. She hates the apps. She says she wants to meet a guy in real life, and Sophia agrees.

Sophia tells a story about going on a date with a man from the apps who talked about how he drinks his own fermented piss. It’s the kind of story you would play for laughs, but she relays it with a sort of glumness, like this is just an accurate picture of the state of the world these days. You have these beautiful women going to literary events, getting ignored except by half-robots, and then having to go on terrible app dates with literal piss drinkers. The indignity of it all.

I decide it’s time to make my way back to my publishers and check in on how the night’s going. I navigate through a group of wealthy Chinese girls in cute dresses and jewelry who seem to have appeared from nowhere. No one is talking to them either. What a world.

A few feet later, someone else comes up to me, looking down at my upper leg and the object on it. “Oh my God, I love The Bell Jar,” she says.

“Me too,” I say back, and I smile at her before continuing on.

Another foot later, there’s another one. “Are you an author?” she asks.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“Is that your book?” she says, tapping The Bell Jar on my leg.

“No,” I say, “that’s Sylvia Plath.”

At this point, I realize my Bell Jar bit’s irony has been lost on everyone except The DJ. It’s too effective. I’m never going to be able to get across the room with it face up, so I flip it over.

I get back to Evan at the book table and he looks pleased. His girlfriend has shown up in good spirits. At least, I think she’s his girlfriend. I can’t exactly remember. She’s sweet. She’s got sort of a Mikey Madison energy. She and I go on a successful expedition to get crème brûlée from the dessert table.

We get back to Evan and he starts making plans for us to go see a movie soon. He’s just worried there’s nothing good out. I try to convince him to go with me to some dusty old revival house to see something on film instead of just hitting an AMC. He sounds open to it. I think I could convert him into true cinephile snobbery.

The event seems to at last be winding down. They’ve sold a good amount of copies. Everyone looks over the moon. There’s a noticeable hole in the aura in the shape of Dan Baltic, who was not able to make it out from that literary gravity well called New York. I run into the DJ again and I tell him how I had to flip The Bell Jar over to get some peace, to amuse him. He laughs, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me. It’s fine. Some people will never know what they’ll never know.

The DJ and I go out to the curb and we connect with Sam Austen, the tall and mysterious man with a beard like a folk singer, whose claim to fame is writing the hit book Meow, which is just the word meow over and over again. He tells me with his usual haunted tone that he’s getting out of Los Angeles soon, going back to Miami. He came to Los Angeles to get away from unspecified things, but he realizes now that they’re worse here than anywhere. Between Sam and Adem Luz Rienspects leaving, it feels like the end of an era.

I introduce Sam and The DJ outside. Sam explains that he’s doing a Pride and Prejudice version of Meow, which is the chapter and punctuation structure of Pride and Prejudice, but with all the words changed to one word that you can probably guess. He explains that he’s having issues repeatedly getting banned from Kindle, probably for getting reported for having books that are just meow, despite them selling well and getting good reviews. He asks me if I have any experience dealing with Kindle bans. I tell him I do not.

I’ve got fifteen minutes before the robot-transport people are supposed to pick me up. Ever hungry for life, I ask the boys if they would pop over to El Prado, which is a block away. I’ve never been, but it’s on my list.

Someone on rs_x asked a few months ago where the cool spots to drink in LA are for former Red Scare types. Someone replied, “Since you sound like a douchebag, you’ll probably just end up at El Prado like everyone else.”

This immediately put it near the top of my list to check out. I’m not afraid of what a Redditor would call a douchebag.

We sneak over to El Prado and I can tell I’m slightly annoying people by making them move for my combat chassis. Fuck them, though. I don’t care. The DJ and Sam get drinks. Then The DJ proceeds to tell us all about Tom Clancy’s obsessive attention to military detail and how he describes his protagonists as pure self-inserts. As always, I’m lightly comparing this to my own work. I’m always wondering how come these other guys are bestsellers and I’m not. It’s not that I want to sell out. It’s just my radar is always on. I want to be aware of the landscape.

The DJ tells one more good story about getting lashed to the wheel of his father’s unlicensed party boat rental operation in a storm when he was seven. I could talk for hours, but the robot-collection people are merciless. They wait for no one. I make my way back out to the street and hope no bum decides to take my phone off my lap as I wait for my ride.

It’s weird to be alone after being surrounded by so many people. Soon enough, the transport guy’s dropship comes and I get home to my other half. She tells me about how she spent a few hours uprooting a very large unwanted plant in our backyard, and how she successfully got it into the green bin despite it being very spiky. She’s proud. I’m proud of her.

I tell her everything about the night. She laughs and says she thinks she’d get along with The DJ’s fiancée. We talk excitedly about our next-day plans to dress up in outrageous space costumes and go to our lovely friend’s thirty-first birthday in North Hollywood and party well into the night. Sometimes life is good.

The next morning, I wake up and briefly go stop by the neverending party-international called the internet. Ross Barkan and Lillian are slinging shit at each other over a joke article she wrote slightly at his expense, which he did not take in good fun. I can’t help but grin at it all. Everyone is getting exactly what they want. Ross is in his element threatening to fight people. Lillian is in her element teasing. The audience loves the drama. We all win.

As I drink my coffee and reflect at my non-working-class French café (apologies to Alex Perez), I realize we’ve done something amazing. We’re actually getting what we want. We all grew up dreaming of little literary circles of old where people write novels and poems to one-up and impress another. Now it’s happening. These are the good times.

It doesn’t matter that we all have day jobs. It doesn’t matter that the publishing industry has collapsed. The scene is alive. A hundred people came out for the launch of a book by a young man who wrote from the heart and sent a cold email. At best, Evan is right, and we’re literally saving America. At worst, we’re just indulging ourselves, but I still call that a win.

It’s like MGM’s motto, the one they chose back when people understood Latin and cared about creative values. Ars gratia artis, art for its own sake. Even if Henry Begler never publishes in that splashy legacy magazine, I think he’s right where he belongs. We are the successors to everything we love in those dusty old books. The Muse lives on.

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