Well, I for one, really really wanna go

April 5, 2024 3:52 AM

I used to want to be a part of the media party circuit so bad. As a young person aspiring to be a writer, I would zoom into certain Instagram Stories of interest, wondering how everyone there got to go. Now, as a person attending them, I am pissed off! I was lied to. Bamboozled. Swindled. Hoodwinked
posted by sammyo (49 comments total)

Good lord. I have the feeling, though, I’m way too old to understand what most of this is about.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:38 AM on April 5 [5 favorites]

me, after reading that entire article:

...

...

...

What's a media party?
posted by AlSweigart at 5:09 AM on April 5 [14 favorites]

Media for mass media practitioners not content - so basically the Carrie Bradshaw bits of Sex and the City
posted by cendawanita at 5:11 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

I am also a millennial pushing 40 who is resentful that the traditional intellectual sounding status-jobs I strived for when I was younger were a waste of time and energy. I would trade in the five years of magazine internships and low-level drudgery in politics for, I dunno, five years of decent housing and employer pension contributions. So the wider frustration, I get. It feels frustrating that the deal I thought I was being presented (be clever, work hard, do jobs our culture ostensibly values) did not translate into reward; in fact, I felt almost attacked (“why did you study humanities if you didn’t want to be poor?”).

However, I try not to let it spill over into toxic resentment. Ragging on other millennials for inauthenticity is a weird throwback. Were they all drinking from jars? Did they have moustaches tattooed on their fingers? Does their social activism extend only as far as clicking like on Facebook? My pearls, I am clutching them.
posted by Probabilitics at 5:13 AM on April 5 [17 favorites]

Andy Warhol was good for one thing and one thing only, and that thing was throwing parties. Parties where one went to see and be seen by the people who were there, not the chat, not the gram, not the tok. I loathe Andy Warhol's art but i swear that motherfucker would take one step in the room described in the link, pull out a fire extinguisher full of magenta Krink, turn everyone into an instantaneous art installation, then pop the cork on the bottle of champagne he brought for his own use, pour a snort into his stilettos, take a sip and walk out.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:14 AM on April 5 [14 favorites]

We need to reinvent the media party. We need to readjust our priorities.

I understand the spirit but the person saying "we need to readjust our priorities" should not be put in charge of reinventing the party.
posted by mhoye at 5:14 AM on April 5 [8 favorites]

Yeah, "We need to reinvent the media party" has big "these deck chairs should be arranged differently" energy
posted by phooky at 5:25 AM on April 5 [15 favorites]

Celebrating 100+ years of young people going into the writing/publishing industry for the cool factor and learning it's just clueless assholes like everywhere else.
posted by rikschell at 5:29 AM on April 5 [24 favorites]

The website seems to be part of Substack and this little bit is in a section called Hate Mail. This article is by Sark Cuckerberg. This article features cynical humour.

That is all.
posted by ashbury at 5:45 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

If this has a point other than to make people on the internet rage, I can't figure out what it is. I realize its main point is making people rage, but I feel like there's supposed to be another, actual point.

Yes, every time I think I've latched onto the gist of it, something comes along to make me think the author is just posturing on that front and didn't really mean it.

It's either tremendously successful at being slippery and rage inducing for everyone or tremendously unsuccessful at making any kind of point, depending on what the intent was. Maybe both.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:04 AM on April 5

I mean, it seems like it's written to people who live in or around New York, are young, want to be trendy and are in the arts but for some reason aren't independently wealthy. Probably not most of metafilter!

I will say that there was a point in my late twenties when I decided that I was a poor fit for cool arts events and cool comp lit parties because everyone was on the make in various ways and they enjoyed it and I didn't, and while I definitely missed out on things after I stopped going, I don't think I would have enjoyed the things much if I'd been there. You have to be a cool person to enjoy cool events; if you're not a cool person and you are at cool events, you won't enjoy them, so why go? Note that I use "cool" here as a neutral term to describe a type, not as a statement of value.

I will say that throwing the party is much more fun; about ten years ago now (sob!) I was part of a group that put on some pretty fantastic and uh "underground" events, and it's amazing how much more you enjoy a thing when you have something to do there and know what's going on behind the scenes, as long as the work is divided up pretty well.
posted by Frowner at 6:13 AM on April 5 [7 favorites]

In the late ‘90s and early 2000s I attended a number of media/dot.com parties in Toronto, including a few for a magazine I wrote for a fair bit. You could practically see the money evaporating through the ceiling as we chugged our free drinks, and before long the parties evaporated, and then the magazine too.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:21 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

I will say that there was a point in my late twenties when I decided that I was a poor fit for cool arts events and cool comp lit parties because everyone was on the make in various ways and they enjoyed it and I didn't

At about the same age, I went to some of those exact same kind of parties, and yeah, everyone was on the make and they were all in it together. It was fun and neat to see, but as someone who wasn't on the make and wasn't in that scene, I was more just observing and enjoying some conversations, rather than actually participating.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:33 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Media parties are no different than any other sort of industry-related party one might go to, with the exception that media people tend to be more literate and more outwardly snarky, both live and in their social media recaps of the event. Regardless of industry, the industry mixer will have the new folks excited to make the scene, the strivers looking to upgrade their conversational partners, the upper management surrounded by flatterers, and the wallflowers nursing their drinks and wagging their tongues. And everyone is gossiping.

I enjoy media parties, but then I have the schmoozing gene and have a fair amount of status, so it's a congenial environment for me. Also, I have not a stitch of Carhartt in my wardrobe.
posted by jscalzi at 6:39 AM on April 5 [11 favorites]

i do think it’s important to learn that rich high status people aren’t actually having more fun than you can have with your no status dumb friends, a rack of old style and a fire pit on a summer night (add a guitar and a rope swing over a watering hole and now you’ve got a party). but you can’t turn the snobs into something they’re not, and there’s no high society without stuck up assholes
posted by dis_integration at 6:42 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

industry parties are horrible in any industry

i imagine they are at least twice as horrible if you work in print media, an industry in seemingly permanent contraction where only a handful of people make any god damn money

everyone pretending to be "on the make" when, in fact, 99% of them have never earned enough to make rent
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 6:48 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

As someone whose last party was a software industry company event, I think the closest to gossip we got was a bunch of ND people thanking the gods we could say things like "that isn't a good idea" at dumb ideas without dancing around it at the workplace. Which is, I must say, really great.

I'm guessing the cool kids aren't at my parties.
posted by NotAYakk at 6:50 AM on April 5

My last party was just after the Civil War.
posted by DJZouke at 6:56 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

While I largely agree, it sounds like the writer isn't taking the opportunity to put the "boots on the ground and serve cunt" themselves and is waiting for the temperature of the room to change by taking no action besides complaining about it on their blog. If you want to get your nipples out at your press event there's a long history of outrageous celebrities (hi Tallulah!) that did shit like that all the time. It may not go the way you want it to, but if you're not doing it either, you'll forever be stuck making small talk about losers that think their work is important.

Sidenote: living in New Orleans my entire life, I missed the note that Carhartt was for jackasses and I purchased one of their hats for a trip I took in January - I think I get why people were reacting to me the way they were now.
posted by bookwo3107 at 7:11 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I understood all of this, but I've been a youngish person in the arts and media in NY and have gone to what I guess you could call a "Media Party" or two and been similarly disappointed that they're basically the grown up version of "Going to Prom to get your picture taken and then heading immediately to the afterparty which might actually be fun."

But this is reminding me of something John Roderick said on MBMBaM back in the day (before his "Bean Dad" flameout) that has stuck with me. Some listener had asked a question about how you break into a scene (asking specifically about a music scene, but this is more broadly applicable, I think.) and Roderick said, essentially, that if you've heard of a scene, it's closed to new members. "Scenes" are organic things that aren't taking applications or trying to develop new talent or any of the things we might imagine them to be when we're young and doe-eyed. Find/start your own scene with like-minded folks at around your own status and help each other to develop into something greater.

You might still have to make appearances at bad parties for the sake of networking, but at least the afterparties will be more worthwhile, and you'll come out of it with a much realer group of friends and sense of belonging.
posted by Navelgazer at 7:12 AM on April 5 [7 favorites]

Give it ten years. I go to plenty of writer parties and these days it’s all people in some stage of recovery trying to get admin jobs at the university for health insurance because there are no freelance gigs and no one wants to adjunct and occasionally talking about entering the same obscure lit prize contest because the cash award is roughly equivalent to the credit card balance we ran up when we actually thought we might get a book advance and the kid/dog/parent needed surgery.
posted by thivaia at 7:14 AM on April 5 [12 favorites]

I was a fresh young thing in the NYC media world of the late 90s and have four words for this article: Same shit, different generation. God, I probably wrote some iteration of this myself, as does every other aspiring writer convinced only they can see things for what they really are. And we all eventually move to the suburbs and look back and cringe.
posted by bassomatic at 7:37 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

Well I, for one, am glad that I have Venmo'd a woman recently.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:49 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

I would have figured these parties would be gold for a bunch of writers. Like random gossip, some minor industry ongoings that people like to read about while waiting at the dentist. Some chance encounters to share juicy bits about celebrities interviewed if not befriended. Some inside baseball among co-workers that is as grating as poker stories to those elsewhere.

Didn't Gawker do a weekly bit back in the day that covered NYC parties in general, and occasionally these parties?

Also, throwing parties sucks, unless you've got some a-hole friends to run security and make sure at least some of the expense is returned. But that means a person has to threaten everyone who takes a cup for their $5 the entire night. And that job sucks. And some great friends to help with cleanup.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:01 AM on April 5

I have never been to this sort of party and I do not know the cultural significance of a single brand mentioned in it and I think I am *fucking delighted* by this fact.
posted by egypturnash at 8:06 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

I was just telling a friend about how an insurance company that I worked for always got invited to a local PR firm's Christmas party because of how much money we spent with them.

My department always looked forward to going because we always remembered them as fun -- when in fact what we were remembering was the good food and free drinks, but was forgetting the part where you're standing around, eating your candied bacon and drinking a rum and coke, for a couple hours with the other corporate strangers who were also invited, uncomfortably trying to make smalltalk with a tractor dealership salesperson or the host of a radio show we'd never heard of or the PR firm's socially awkward graphic designer who is also there just for the food and drinks. Not that any of them were any more excited about talking to the marketing coordinator from Regional Health Insurance Inc I suppose.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:20 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

I kinda want to go to the Gasolina party described at the end tho
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:35 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

everyone pretending to be "on the make" when, in fact, 99% of them have never earned enough to make rent

I think "on the make" may mean something different than what you're intending.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:53 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Inside Inside Baseball
posted by caviar2d2 at 9:10 AM on April 5

I loathe Andy Warhol's art

tell me you haven't seen his Gretzky without telling me you haven't seen his Gretzky
posted by elkevelvet at 9:20 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

valerie solanas did nothing wrong
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:44 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

As a person who was briefly adjacent to this world... ultimately, it was too many dicks on the dance floor.
posted by amanda at 9:45 AM on April 5 [6 favorites]

sounds like a tripping hazard
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:05 AM on April 5 [5 favorites]

I looked at the About:

Alas, as I’d learned even back in those halcyon days when I tried to drink an extra salary’s worth of Sprite at the Watergate cafeteria, media is a lot like Antarctic glaciers: pretty to look at, yet constantly in meltdown.

Drinking oodles of soda as a job perk. I am charmed!

I also am charmed by the photos in the About me section. Given that the writer is an Asian American woman, albeit significantly younger than me, I have a little bit of the "there but for the grace of god" feeling. Luckily I realized immediately, even prior to finishing undergrad but while I still had dreams of being a journalist, that I don't have anywhere near the hustle required to make it in the NYC media world. Watching friends schlep the review cds they got from their internship to sell at [forgot the name of the music store in the Lower East Side] so that they could pay for pierogis after going out, while they were living in a one bedroom apartment divided by plywood into a two bedroom apartment, no way man.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:28 AM on April 5

I say, be the cunt you want to see served in the world!
posted by praemunire at 10:33 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

Ah this essay is part of a limited run Hate Read series. I like this tweeted reaction: "Love the project. Every single one of these people needs to try softball or something."

I think I enjoy over-the-top writing more than I realize. And sometimes I feel a surprising amount of compadreness with the hate rant writer (line breaks added):

The Kardashians have, for nearly two decades, clawed at “real” prestige, and they have mostly attained it through sheer persistence and market force of fame. But we simply cannot, in the age of Beyoncé, give in and actually declare them to be our royal family. Why has everyone already surrendered? We have some goddamn American agency here! This is what the Pilgrims white-knuckled months of seasickness for!

Look, do I see Kris’s game? Begrudgingly. Do I respect this family’s collective fame and wealth? Ehhh.

Have I sunk untold hours of my one short and precious life into Reddit threads on each sister’s plastic surgery journeys? Of course! (Kylie should’ve stopped in 2021, Kendall’s work is more sly but still traceable, and Khloe’s denials are, frankly, insulting to eyesight.

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:37 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

METAFILTER: ultimately, it was too many dicks on the dance floor.
posted by philip-random at 10:39 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

Media parties are no different than any other sort of industry-related party one might go to

I think the difference is that 20-30 years ago those industry parties fucked or were at least trying to. (Don't say 'not mine', Scalzi, I'm not calling you out specifically, but the science fiction hotel party con circuit was legendary for that and many of your peers were no exception). I'm not saying it was a universally better time - I've commented elsewhere about how absolutely predatory it was for the under-18s and it wasn't much better for the just-barely-legals - but for the people who were of age and consenting, those parties were a grand old time because everyone was sleeping with everyone else.

With the sex element removed, because coworkers generally don't sleep with each other anymore because even if it's not sexual harassment, there's still optics, and the alcohol toned down to responsible levels, those parties do become intolerably boring try-hard networking affairs. Law parties are the same way.

The piece, however, does make me feel unutterably old.
posted by corb at 11:36 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

It's shocking to me that I currently am making a living as a writer, though I don't know how much longer that will be true. When I started at a daily newspaper in 1991, they paid me $50 per week. To work 50 hours. And that included taking and developing my own photographs. I was expected to show up at 7am AND make the boss coffee as soon as I walked in.

$1 an hour!

I quit as soon as I got my Associated Press award and instead got a job bagging groceries at Tom Thumb for minimum wage.

Having the ability to cadge a few free drinks or scarf down an all-apps dinner on someone else's dime would've been pure gold for me back in the day, though.

Pretty sure I'm the punchline for a lot of jokes nowadays (Master's in Humanities over here!), but if you're somewhere working as a museum docent or interning at a publication for $0 or some kind of half-assed stipend that wouldn't feed a sparrow, just know I'm silently raising my fist in solidarity and hoping you find a job that includes benefits sooner than later.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 11:51 AM on April 5 [4 favorites]

All the Sorrows Parties
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:11 PM on April 5 [3 favorites]

The author viciously attacks a celebration/networking event as if it was a guaranteed transaction for all attendees to find truth, connection, and opportunity.

Spoiler alert: They aren’t, never have been, and never will be.

Not every party is for me, either. As a 40-something white, 5’8” Carhartt wearing dude with no shovel experience, I don’t find a lot of parties up my alley either: swinger parties, dance parties, pampered chef parties.

I’m also morally opposed to and have lost opportunities by not attending and/or disliking these parties, too. I was invited, it wasn’t a condition of employment.

So, rage all you want, but know that the parties don’t end or change because it wasn’t your cup of tea.
posted by WorkshopGuyPNW at 12:30 PM on April 5

A table saw is an acceptable shovel surrogate.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:41 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

there's nothing wrong with workwear...
posted by mattgriffin at 12:57 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

I'm wearing a Carhartt shirt right now, but not holding a shovel. I guess I'm ready for a party?
posted by Dip Flash at 1:49 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

so, no hard liquor and handgun night.
posted by clavdivs at 5:22 PM on April 5

Corb, I’m amused that you think I would defend the (in)famously lecherous science fiction community from accusations that their parties were filled with various people on the prowl, in a manner not always welcome by the objects of attention. Not only is it all true, but unfortunately in many ways it was worse than people imagined. The fact that Isaac Asimov was once offered a whole convention panel on the subject of “The Power of Positive Pinching” speaks volumes on where things used to be, far later along than it should have been.

Nor am I going to suggest everything is perfect in those environs now. They are better than they used to be, in no small part because codes of conduct are the rule of the road for almost all conventions and industry get-togethers, and they are generally taken seriously. But, as with nearly every industry, raising ourselves from a previously low baseline doesn’t mean there isn’t more distance to go.

In any event, as I understand it, hooking up has been efficiently channeled into phone apps these days, which if nothing else takes the pressure off of industry events to be the place for that.
posted by jscalzi at 5:23 PM on April 5 [6 favorites]

now I have this vision of Ray Bradbury feeding dimes into a typewriter.
posted by clavdivs at 7:47 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

OMG lol, I’ve been wearing a (borrowed) Carhartt baseball cap recently, actually was wondering what the logo was for. No surprise I’m never ever invited to parties.
posted by sammyo at 10:38 PM on April 5

A retrospective on the Hate Reads project.
posted by sagc at 7:26 AM on April 26