I went to Dimes Square and it wasn't even a square

It was more of a piece of pavement closed off by a few barriers, sprinkled with tables and chairs of the area's various “cool” restaurants and bars. Basically a terrace, with skaters occasionally cutting through the illuminating convos of the various lower east side dwellers. At Le Dive (a weirdly french-esque cocktail/small bites/natural wine bar), my friend and I overheard a 30-year-old condé nast looking man talking with his father about carrying fentanyl testing strips in his wallet instead of condoms cause that’s just the kind of guy he was. Of course, the micro neighbourhood extends further than just that piece of pavement, but for some reason, whenever someone mentioned dimes square in the past, I really thought there would be a real square. One with a little fountain in the middle, a few benches and tables where to play chess.

I am not here to write the nth substack op-ed about dimes square as a ““vibe””. I barely could get through reading any of those pieces¹ when it was the hottest thing to write about amid the ‘22 vibe shift. I am also not from new york, I spent a mere 8 days there. My knowledge is superficial, based off of assumptions and a few sparse conversations on which it would be presumptuous to base off an in-depth analysis. But exactly because it is new york and the lower east side that we are talking about, maybe those impressions and hasty conclusions are precisely all that is needed to write something. So here are some (underdeveloped) thoughts on dimes square, the state of culture, seeing Adam Friedland at a bar.

At the intersection not of art and technology but of Hester and Ludlow, I sat down at nyc’s newest hottest cafe, Casetta. Italian name, french baguettes, danish pastries, I felt like I was in “Europe” - the same “Europe” as a collective idea americans say they visit when they go on their trip to Paris, Rome, and Prague. It felt very yuppie Amsterdam in the sense that I felt uncomfortable sharing the space with the rest of the cafe dwellers (i have the same feeling every time i get a coffee at toki or a natural wine at twee prinsen). Even though we had both chosen the same spot, I could not identify myself in the same category as people as the ones sitting next to me. I could feel the judgmental looks of the locals/original inhabitants of the area, aka the chinese community which, while being partially colonised by the new hipsters, still remains the most prevalent population of the area (duh- it’s china town). I wanted to scream to the unknowingly dripped out chinese woman staring us down that I was not like the other costumers! Yes, I was sitting there, drinking the same shitty 7$ cappuccino as they were, but me? no, i do not work in publishing, i do not have a small fluffy dog called toast, i do not wear birkis because of tiktok, but because i actually work in a restaurant and that’s the shoe of the industry, and no, i cannot actually afford this lifestyle, but yes i do like the taste of natural wine, and no i do not know how to write kouign amann, but yes i do like to eat one from time to time. I doubt that the old chinese woman would have cared! Nobody cares about explanations of authenticity, defences against an imaginary tribunal in which your choices regarding where you eat, where you shop, where you get a drink, where you go out, who you follow, who follows you back are carefully judged to situate your position in the subcultural battlefield. Yet, every single choice we make seems to be branded by these wider categorizations, every decision a step towards your inclusion into a starter pack meme.

Dimes square is just the most talked about place™ where these differentiations take place. It is talked about so much because it’s New York baby! and new yorkers seem to have a thing for self-mythology (I am not against it/above it : look at me, i go to nyc for a week and i am writing a blog post about it 🤦‍♂️). But it happens in Amsterdam, it happens in London, it happens likely anywhere else with its own unique set of symbolic differentiations. So dimes square became the most popular nomenclature for a fairly global phenomenon. The way one talked about dimes square itself became a way to differentiate oneself. There were the ones dismissing it as just a place for a few good restaurants, some forcing upon it the image of the only edgy crazy intellectual spot in the world, some drenching it in esoteric value through angelic posting (there, i did it, i referenced angelicism, are you happy now?).

But essentially, what I am trying to get at is quite simple:

We live in a society ! where culture seems to be the most valuable capital we can have (maybe because actual capital is so fucked and social one has become too fragmented/digital to be straightforwardly understood). Cultural capital has become so intrinsically linked to identity that differentiations of what type of cultural capital you have are super fundamental. Every day we run the risk of our favourite spot being posted on TikTok and exposed to the masses. Every day we run the risk of our fav underground artist becoming mainstream. Every day we face a disorienting and never-ending process of commercialization/cooptation of everything we like. The neoliberal capitalist realist machine knows no bounds. Hence making sure that your own thing is cool and authentic and not mainstream is a full-time job. Dimes square is yes a Place, a geographical physical architectural location for a symbolic conflict which virtually [virtually as in both nearly and digitally] takes and has taken place elsewhere. Anything: a hat, a coffee, a flavour of celsius, your preferred mode of nicotine consumption (menthols, hand rolled cigarettes, vapes, snus): has a (sub)cultural meaning. The scenes at play at the moment are quite difficult to name, to categorize. There is the natural wine fermentation allison roman oat milk le dive nebulous community, there are the tompkins rogue hyper deconstructed k-pop enjoyers. There are the river chess club angelicism ambient malboro slate bar italia affiliates. There are infinite recompositions of these words and many more in different orders which produce infite similar yet distinct communities.

Maybe my brain has been broken by subcultural theory and it is wrong to think about culture in this way. It is definitely annoying and I do not like the way I immediately rationalize and intelletcualize any experience I have. I definetely felt this when I was in new york and my brain was buzzing with likely basic cultural observations which seemed so important (this blog post is an attempt at putting them on paper so that they can leave my mind). But it feels like these sort of mini confrontations between (not necessarily opposing but conflicting) scenes operating within the same borders are present everywhere, also online. Space is limited in new york, but also in the world, and also on the internet. It is limited and expensive and under threat of being bought out. Hence communities ‘make space’ by through symbolic (and non!) acts of appropriations. Stickers and graffiti, promkins, movie screenings, newsletters, memes, ironic t-shirts, micro targeted podcasts, Instagram stories. Every day there is a chance to rewrite the space as yours. But more importantly ! every day there is a chance to rewrite the space as not of someone else’s ! because more than claiming your own identity through the creation of a personal style, cultural identities are created in the negative way ! by saying who is NOT part of your clique, by saying which restaurant you should not dine at, what movie you should not see. These lines of inclusion and exclusion are blurred and constantly changing [Dean Kissick was on the angelicism “Retard” list but was also at the screening of his movie]. Where one will be placed on the spectrum between type of new hipster 1 and opposite new type of hipster number 2 is at once arbitrary and obvious, this spectrum being in constant flux, ready to be rewritten at any instance. What matters is the narrative, the story, the aura.

On the 4th of July I went with my two non-new york friends to a party in a chelsea townhouse we found through an edgy looking poster on IG. The house was beautiful and empty, devoid not only of personal items, decor, clutter, but also of people. As we were smoking in the little garden at the back, strangers approached us (as they do there) and told us that there had been more people earlier, but that now the drinks were over and the vibes were off. A man jumped into the conversation and asked what we thought about the fairy lights that had just turned on. I thought it looked like the set for a lumineers music video. He explained the garden while seemingly un-ordered was carefully curated following japanese principles. In line to the bathroom we talked to someone who was getting passively aggressively kicked out “for looking like a degenerate”. He shared the address of his friend’s place where him and his degenerate friends were going to head afterwards. We walked a block and found ourselves on a rooftop to watch the fireworks, only for the macy’s building to cover most of the view. So someone stated streaming the live show on youtube while we began unpacking what just happened. Elija, a prospective Columbia law student who had noticed our “european” accent told us that his friend lived in the servants quarter of the house, which was the room in front of the garden where we were sitting. The other room mate was the Japanese garden man, and both were apparently hedge fund managers. Someone had snooped around and found a copy of “Race, evolution, and behaviour” on a bookshelf. Someone else recalled that their friend had called the owner of the townhouse a fascist, but also said that his friend was the type of person who called everyone a fascist. But by the end of the night it was clear that there was a narrative, an us and them. The degenerates getting kicked out of the fascist hypehouse. The memory, the lore, created right there. From a banal experience into a story. Everyday in new york new stories just like this, experiences asking to be memed into common memories. Everyday there is a narrative. Everyday there is a new version of the us and the them. So everyday there is a chance to call a place yours and not theirs.

On my last night in new york, I hung out with my new degenerate acquaintance (who throughout the week provided us with great lower east side reccs- allowing me to get a decent view of dimes square extended universe). We met at elsewhere in Brooklyn where MGNA crrrta was performing alongisde a few “household” lower east side music scene names. The music was good, the crowd (for once) was decent too (new yorkers/americans tend to not really dance at clubs). We ubered to the river with his friend (who someone had referred to earlier as a twitter groupchat marcoinfluencer). The river seems to be the cool new bar in china town, in front of my favourite spot, Columbus Park (where senior citizens of china town hang out, play cards, put on small music performances under the shade of the worlds tallest prison complex). The conversations jumped from the music scene, to urbit, to the angelicism film (i had to ask if they liked it), to things i cannot remember and things i could not hear because of the loud left field hyper dub that was playing in the back. At one point I turned around and I realized Adam Friedland was sitting next to us hanging out with a friend. A momentary feeling of ‘omg’ quickly turned into ‘of course’, as we moved onto the next topic of conversation. Sometimes I forget that at the end, all these people, all of these micro and macro influencers, all these figures of the dimes square extended scene, they are just normal regular guys like you and me. The only difference is that they live in new york where everything seems to be a story waiting to be told, a blog post (like this) waiting to be written. The mythology is just another way to make sense and make meaning out of personal cultural experiences. The media produced is a testament of the battle played out on the restaurant terrace and in discord servers. Dimes square is just a place, one of many. It is a metonym for a bigger trend of “resistance” and conflict of subcultures. Their frictions and various modes of negotiation will always remain partial solutions to the manifold modes of hegemony present on the ground and online. The dominating force of “real” capital will continue to maintain and reproduce mechanisms of dominance over physical places (and the internet- for what is worth). Subcultures can negotiate this through various means, appropriating spaces by marking out territories through gatekeeping, developing their own rituals and mythologies, adopting and rejecting vernaculars and aesthetics. Yet these will remain mental images, immaterial and unconcreted solutions to material and concrete concerns. Dime Square(s) are most effective on a symbolic level. A level which always runs the risk of being appropriated by the mainstream, but which is the easiest to play around it.

Nyc is a city of symbols. Which one will you choose?

1. https://thebaffler.com/latest/escape-from-dimes-square-harrison this is maybe the only good one i have found