Plaster Shoots: Heavy Traffic at Camden Art Centre

Who’s here for the lit and who’s here for the scene? I asked as I walked north up Finchley Road from the tube station to Camden Art Centre for the first London launch of New York literary magazine Heavy Traffic.

Because, from my point of view, the London lit scene sucks. The city isn’t short on writers, it seems like every other person you meet has a Substack, but a lit scene is more than that, it’s the incestuous nest of artists, writers, critics, groupies, hangers on and functioning alcoholics, it’s the bars and cafes and one night parties and regular venues that host them. It’s work and play. And from that point of view, London is lacking. I lay most of the blame on the pandemic, but really that two-three year interlude in our lives only accelerated the already-existing plague of shuttered venues, alcohol inflation and a general lack of joie de vivre that the city cultivates like black mould.

In place of a local scene, London’s artists and writers have spent the past few years developing parasocial relationships with that of downtown Manhattan. They see the city through a thousand summer break Instagram stories. They look past the rats and the rents and imagine a world where $70,000 salaries and 3 am martinis are considered the bare minimum. Names shine like OLED billboards: The Drunken Canal, Byline, Interview, Forever, Casual Encountersz, Clandestino, Crumps. Dimes Square may be dead, but it haunts London. Naturally, the Heavy Traffic launch promised to draw a crowd.

Heavy Traffic was founded in 2020 by Patrick McGraw against an “increasingly illiterate” society. (Disagree? Choose a comment section at random and try to argue your case). The first issue set the tone with contributors Stephanie LaCava, Dean Kissick and Seth Price. Later issues featured Sean Thor Conroe, Chris Kraus and Natasha Stagg. The latest issue, its fifth to date, includes work by Mark Leckey, Reinier de Graaf, Amalia Ulman, Lynne Tillman, Bud Smith, Hannah Regel, Ada Antoinette, Mark von Schlegell, Claude Balls, Riska Seval, and Sarah Thomas. Of those, Regel and Thomas were in London to read their work. McGraw also roped in ‘former youtuber’ Clive Martin, painter and musician Issy Wood and man of the moment, Kissick.

The invite said 6 pm and I arrived early to make sure I got a spot. I shouldn’t have worried. It was well over an hour before the readings started. The queue to the bar was half an hour long (the more intelligent among us dipped out to buy beers at the off licence over the road). I killed time by circling the gallery’s garden which by then had the atmosphere of a nightclub smoking area: small cliques, exaggerated chatting and discarded cans. I don’t smoke – never have – instead, I scoped out the crowd, which was almost exclusively made up of twenty-something year olds wearing Salomons, silver Nike P-6000s, baggy distressed cargos, black jackets and long woollen coats. You know you’re old when you notice the trends.

I spotted a few familiar faces: Plaster contributors Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Nimrod Kamer and Clive Martin; editors Sophie Barshall and Violet Conroy; I stopped and caught up with Paul Jonathan and his friend Maxine Beiny, who earlier this year I heard read a piece of fanfiction about the actor Peter Vack; there was a curator I’d last seen nearly a decade ago, dancing on the tables of Soho’s Crobar in the aftermath of a now-infamous staff xmas party – thankfully, for his sake, he didn’t see me; and moving between everyone was Kissick. There’s a strange aura around this man. The Brit who broke America. His return to Britain is being treated like Elvis’ return to the US.

Clive Martin kicked off the readings, calling out the elephant in the room by noting the ‘Dimes Square meets London’ energy and thanking Peter Thiel for making this all possible. Instead of the extract of SEO copy he’d promised, he read from his “completely unpublishable” autobiography detailing his experience of “a rogue housing experiment I was embroiled in for several heady months,” living as a property guardian on Willow Street, Shoreditch. A tale of improbably named drug dealers, gangster landlords and improvised home defence weaponry, and ultimately, a poignant take on the lives shaped by shit housing.

This was followed up by two short stories. The first by Sarah Thomas, author of QUEEN K and writer in TANK, Art Review, The London Magazine, Epoch Review and more. If I’m honest, the style (magic realism, trauma, seriousness, literary) and delivery didn’t sit comfortably following Clive’s comedy picaresque. It was a piece of writing that works better on the page, than in front of a boozed up audience. Hannah Revel was next, with a short story of a scene all-too-familiar to people of my generation and class: the small plates restaurant birthday party. A little vignette of overpriced, underfilled sharing plates, nameless drunk acquaintances, casual flirtation and crushing monogamy, status anxiety and cocaine.

The word at the beginning of the night was that Issy Wood was one of the major draws of the night. One person I spoke to reckoned that Wood probably brought half the crowd. I thought it was funny, considering she’s not known as a writer. She read out a couple of confessional blog posts. Private posts written only for her mum and a few close friends. The first one she’d written only a few days earlier about her chronic pain, blood, hatred of Shanghai and her belief that, given America is already bad, Trump can’t do much worse, and a second one from “another from a time further back” when she was “being courted” by Larry Gagosian and discovered her boyfriend was cheating on her (he shared his screen with her on Facetime, and Wood saw him tap the familiar curly H of the Hinge app).

If they weren’t there for Wood, they were there for Dean. With no introduction, no hesitation, Kissick took to the mic and dropped, “My mother keeps flashing her vagina… I think… My mother keeps flashing her vagina… On purpose… But I don’t see anything.” He followed up with a little financial advice, saying “the next 8 weeks or so” would be a good time to buy cryptocurrency, before yelling across the room into the garden that everyone should, “shut the fuck up… I’m about to read some autofiction.”

With that, he told a story of living in NYC and moving suddenly back to London after his mum was run over by a bus, leaving her a double leg amputee. Along the way, Dean tries to track down the precise location of the accident, is beaten up for his wallet and accidentally triggers a traumatic flashback for his mum when he brings her a Tesco Finest Dine In Mixed Berry Trifle because the mixture of red juice and yellow cream reminds her of the bloody tissues of her crushed legs.

Kissick ended his story with the seriousness of a sermon, saying that, “you need to experience ego death if you’re going to live in London.” Every interaction in this city requires you to put yourself aside, otherwise you won’t survive. He experienced it when he was beaten up, and we need to experience it too.

The room cleared quickly as people dispersed to the loo queues and back outside. My legs were stiff. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d been standing still for too long or because of phantom pain. I found our photographer and managed to gather the readers for just a few photographs. I caught McGraw and asked him what he thought of the night. It was a nice crowd and he was surprised by the turn out. And optimistic for next week’s Paris launch at After 8 Books.

I drifted from clique to clique, asking for people’s takes on the night: are they artists or writers, who are they here to see, what did they make of it. One American artist whose name I didn’t catch was keen to make her opinions known:

“Writers really need to figure out how to get people to read their writing for them because, newsflash, they’re bad at it. How are we all supposed to pay attention if you’re hemming and hawwing and losing your place every four seconds, and you have the confidence of someone who’s sitting huddled over a typewriter for five hours a day. Dean Kissick was the only one who had any panache, he was the only one I could pay attention to. Everyone else seemed like great writers. Issy wood, maybe 6/10 just because we all know who she is and what she’s talking about, but come on people, give me a show! Give me a show!”

Give me a show. I had that plea echoing in my ears as I made my long journey home, south of the river. The artist tells you to kill your ego, the audience demands a show. Are egos holding us back or has London crushed all sense of the egomania necessary in all good art?

The London lit scene isn’t entirely dead. There’s Paul Jonathan’s Deleted Scenes at Greek Street’s BEASY, a cocktail and hotdog bar that on a good night can barely contain the sweating hordes of writers. Apparently unaware of this, Maia Béar and Tom Willis started Soho Reading Series. Off the back of that, Rachel Connolly and Isis O’Regan have stepped up to host a series of readings across various venues. Recently, Isaac Simon’s South Parade gallery has become a popular choice, its iconic double-story triangular courtyard becoming something like a modern-day Globe Theatre.

There are writers. There are readers. There is hope. Where do we need to go next? What are we missing? Suggestions welcome.