DOORS 7pm
Your correspondent arrived at the scene ten minutes past the slated start time for The Drift’s launch party for its latest issue. Well, the latest two issues, since, as the editors later explained, “we didn’t have a fall party.” The buzzy new magazine, founded in 2020 for “young writers who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse,” was healthily on Issue Twelve, and our venerable old magazine, for Harvard aesthetes and earnest ones, was finally comping half the cover for a blog dispatch.
I’ve never been to a launch party with DOORS before, and thus was somewhat apprehensive when I learned from a promoter friend that the Georgia Room at the Freehand Hotel was not a salon, but a nightclub. I was not of age in the State of New York. Thankfully as my friend (Roxy Hreb ‘26, Dionysus) and I peered through the assemblage of pleated trousers, black dresses, and artfully loose button-ups lined up outside the Freehand, we noted that the queue was just held up by a tote-bag table. I dutifully purchased a subscription, received a tote-bag, and we were in.
As I had been anxiously querying various permutations of “Georgia Room” / “Thursday” / “21+” / “Age” / “ID” / “18” in the hours before the launch party, I had learned quite a bit about the Georgia Room beforehand. The nightclub was named after Georgia O’Keeffe, and apparently pays tribute to her “post-modern concept of elegance and femininity.” While I wasn’t much of an art historian, Drift founder Kiara Barrow ‘16 was a proud member of the Advocate Art Board, and I looked forward to elucidating what exactly was postmodern about O’Keeffe. An “avant-garde disco ball” was also advertised. On balance, the nightclub did aim to feel like “an artist’s home that you were invited to a party at,” no small feat—and now all the dilapidated artists, writers, publishers, dreamers, and nobodies of New York City had arrived.
As expected, smalltalk was bustling and the drinks averaged $20 (not comped). Hreb and I circulated the room at a snail’s pace, catching bon mots: “AND CAN WE JUST DISCUSS WHAT THE ‘DOWNTOWN’ SECTION IS SUPPOSED TO MEAN”; “REMEMBER VICE.” At the Sanctum we too have Thursday night events, known as Broods, and I think Dionysus and I had stumbled into what we, underneath the boxed California Chablis and sophomoric twee, all still aspire to.
READING 7:30PM
None of this was particularly surprising, given that Barrow had been our President, and co-founder Rebecca Panovka ‘16 had been editor of the 150th Anniversary Anthology. The reading, too, was the most predictable part of the evening. I’ve always felt that readings should be kept short, but perhaps the half-page excerpts at this event were a little too short. From a podium, we heard from two fiction pieces, two dispatches, a poem, a “Hawk” and a “Character” (long essays; The Drift labels each issue’s longform with either a thesis or antithesis; e.g., Saving Face/Face Value, Not About the Plague/About the Plague”). Most of the authors preferred to stand to the podium left rather than on it, perhaps a proximity and rejection of power, perhaps a mode of convenience.
From my near-front view I could see an elevated seating area to the podium right; our promoter friend had arrived and informed me that on a regular night it would be the VIP area, and in which VIP area/elevated seating area were seated some six or so white women.
The readings had piqued my interest (reading length and future interest are negatively correlated) so much that I almost wanted to step out of the red-soaked Georgia Room and properly read the issue, but then the Avant-Garde Disco Ball captivated me. I guess the mirror bits were round instead of square in a very Rabanne fashion, and the ball wasn’t a full ball, and instead the top half was a concave reflector, and I guess avant-garde is passe anyways, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Luckily, the readings finished ahead of schedule, the sweatered DJ started his set, and it started functioning much like a regular disco ball.
PARTY 8PM
No one was dancing. Roxy and I had anticipated this, and we took the moment in the swarm to the bar to meet Barrow and Panovka. We reminisced over The Advocate and gushed over The Drift—if you are reading this, I forgot to ask: what’s it like to run a professional magazine now? To find fulfillment as an English concentrator? With full earnestness: you are our icons; thank you for creating a place for in-depth thinking. The recent firings at LA Times and Pitchfork, algorithm-driven media, etc., had put me into a depressive funk, and reading Issue Twelve in full on the bus back to Cambridge finally awoke something again.
Circulating, we met a Harvard Lampoon graduate board trustee. He was 30 years old and bought Roxy and I drinks. I loved him. Other characters included authors, authors-to-be, and anthropology graduate students. The bathroom was lined with framed New Yorker covers.
Incredibly for an event with DOORS 7PM on the invite, we were still going strong by the 11pm mark. Most of the conversation had spilled out into the slightly more spacious piano bar area, where Dionysus and I sat on the piano bench, and I was being lampooned for my lack of familiarity with SubStack, que tu es grossier!, and we had our mise-en-scene taken by what I hoped was a Getty photographer. With three martinis Roxy keyed out Rhapsody in Blue and then we were off, down the stairs, past the tote-bag table. I couldn’t help comparing the topological history of our evening to that of parties in the Sanctum (recent themes include the Berlin Wall), but outside the Freehand, disconcertingly, there was not the familiar sight of clutched smokes. The Drift had grown up.
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The Drift Issue Twelve Launch Party
The Georgia Room at the Freehand Hotel
Thursday March 14, 2024
$20 for admission and latest issue
Verdict: A must go.
2025