What will become of this cursed experiment? Who’s keen to read something that doesn’t immediately smack of sex or celebrity?
Anxious thoughts circle me at International Bar, a glorious dive in New York City’s East Village. I review my notes and take a few measured gulps of beer. Easy now. This mission requires lucidity, doll. Several middle-aged men scattered across the bar eye me warily. It’s a Wednesday, early evening. Who is this broad?
I’ve identified my table of choice, but it’s occupied. Every few minutes or so, I peek over my shoulder to assess the guy who’s claimed it. He doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything. No drink, no company, nothing. Damn. A fixture. He’s here for the long haul. I guess I haven’t been subtle with my peeking. He’s caught me a few times now, and I’m beginning to worry he thinks I’m trying to fuck him. I return to my notes. To my relief, he gets up and lumbers out. Fuck yeah. I settle at the coveted table, only to realize it’s situated right below a speaker. The music is great, but it’ll blot out the whole exchange. Hmm. To my left, there’s a short hallway that leads…where? I’ve been to this bar a few times, but I’ve never done much investigation.
I once again gather up my unreasonable number of stray items (an Uncensored NY tote bag, loose papers, multiple jackets, and a waning glass of beer), and slink towards the back. And, it’s perfect, baby. It’s brilliant. A small room just large enough to house a single low-slung table and half a dozen wooden chairs, illuminated by the Bada Bing! babe in neon, turned curiously on her axis. Every inch of the surrounding walls is scarred or stickered with graffiti.
This is the spot, I conclude. This is the ideal locale for the inaugural ROT interview.
When Emily arrives, I leap from my seat and greet her with “Oh shit!,” which is my ever-articulate way of communicating that I’m happy to see you. She fixates on the aforementioned neon sign behind me. “That’s different. That sign used to be a butt…with underwear.” I nod along. I trust her. She’s lived in this neighborhood for many years now, and International is one of her favorite haunts.
You must understand: When I started planning this series, I knew Emily would be one of my first subjects. Emily is the co-founder of Filthy Dreams, a blog that “analyzes art, culture and politics with a touch of camp.” Filthy Dreams, as Emily will explain, was originally conceived as “a boozy confetti-filled New York nightclub with the same acts appearing again and again to rousing applause,” dreamed up alongside co-founder Matthew Marion Gray, a.k.a. Matthew Annis. If you’re familiar with Emily’s writing on any level, this will make sense to you, as this campy, confetti-littered spirit is embedded in her signature style.
In retrospect, this was precisely what impressed me about Filthy Dreams: Style. Remember style? Journalists were once revered for it. That is, before it was subsumed by corporate interests. Honestly, I didn’t realize I had been so starved for it until I read Emily’s work for the first time. It’s delicious. It’s depraved. It’s witty. It’s the type of writing that’s truly rewarding to read. I was especially interested in speaking to her because she launched the blog back in 2013, leaving a staff writer position at Hyperallergic in favor of going solo.
Listen, y’all (will come to) know I love a bold self-starter. In 2025, it’s becoming increasingly *painfully* obvious that the old, institutionally-vetted ladders to success — especially in journalism — are crumbling. Quickly. Disintegrating, even. Like, I’m no expert, but I think we’ve got a termite problem…
Oh god, they’re crawling up your legs. You feel that? Jesus, there’s a whole swarm…
Listen, this is unbearable to watch. I’m going to hold your hand and tell you gently:
It’s over.
JUMP, BITCH.
Do it now.
And, without further ado, take some cues from a writer who jumped early.
Why are we here?
Emily Colucci: We’re at International Bar, which is my favorite bar in the city.
I forgot how great this bar is.
EC: It’s the best. There are other good dive bars, but not as good as this dive bar.
This is unmatched. It also seems kind of under the radar, like we didn’t have to fight for this table.
EC: Yeah. There was one time I was here, sitting in this room, and a bar crawl came through, and they clearly looked like, “What did we just walk into?” They had a drink and then all left. I’ve also been in here when people have walked in, looked at the scene with the regulars up front, and just walked right out.
I love it. I love when a bar serves as its own filter for assholes. Anyhow, I want to acknowledge how we originally connected, which I believe was through me pitching you Jordan Sullivan’s novel, Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking in 2023. He’s since published Drinking Margaritas at the Mall, a book which I recently read. I also read your review of it, which was great. As I was reading your review, I got a glimpse of your own nostalgia for the once almighty American mall, which made me wonder what the teenage Emily was like. What was her cultural consumption like? Who were her early filth elders?
EC: Oh, well, teenage Emily loved Hot Topic. I worked at Hot Topic, too. I graduated from being a Hot Topic fan to a Hot Topic worker, which is a huge graduation.
A major flex at the time.
EC: Oh, yeah. In suburban Pittsburgh? Major flex. But yeah, teenage Emily was really obsessed with Korn. So, I guess one of my original filth elders was Jonathan Davis. You know what? Korn is actually experiencing a revival with some of Gen Z, which is fascinating. A couple years ago now, there was a girl on my block wearing a Korn shirt, and she was clearly in high school.
What do you think that’s about?
EC: I don’t know. It’s fascinating. I’m happy for them. I don’t really listen to them anymore. Every so often, I get nostalgic and I will, and I’m like, “This wasn’t bad.”
What were you reading at the time?
EC: I read a lot of old Vanity Fair. I would read Chris Hitchens in Vanity Fair, which was like in the early 2000s, when Vanity Fair was actually quite good. The Epstein stuff (by author and investigative journalist Vicky Ward). I remember reading that. I mean, I read a little bit of everything. I remember being the weird person in high school who was really into Christopher Hitchens.
Why Hitchens?
EC: I don’t know. Well, it was good journalism. I was interested in journalism. I was also interested in music journalism. Some Hunter S. Thompson stuff, too. But yeah, it was an interest in journalism.
Did you move to New York for school?
EC: Yes.
And was that for an undergrad degree in journalism?
EC: No, I did French. I had a minor in journalism and a minor in art history. At the time, I didn’t want to do religious art and medieval art history courses, so I’m like, “A minor’s fine.” But now I like that art almost better than contemporary art. Originally I was thinking about doing journalism, and then I realized that a journalism degree is essentially bullshit. You don’t learn anything, and that’s why NYU made it so you had to double major. While I was in school, they changed the requirements that you have to double major with journalism because you don’t learn anything. I had the worst courses I ever took in the journalism department.
Just total fluff?
EC: Yeah, just really antiquated concepts for 2003 to 2007. I remember I had a course called “TV and the Information Explosion!” Like, it’s not 1960. And then I took a reporting course, which was just hard news reporting. We did the same kind of hard news article for the entire semester. And I’m like, “Well, I got it in the first two weeks. I’m not learning anything. I can learn how to write in other departments. I don’t necessarily need a journalism degree.”
But you were interested in writing.
EC: Yeah, I was always interested in writing. Originally, going into school, I really wanted to do music journalism because I was so into music in high school. That’s really what I was into. I was the person really into the band T-shirts and music. I wanted to do that. Then I got into school, and I’m studying journalism and learning nothing.
So you were pretty disillusioned early on.
EC: Yeah. Like, French was hard for me, and it was actually a challenge. I felt like I was learning something. So that’s why I did that.
Why French in particular?
EC: Well, I had taken French in high school, and then I studied abroad in Paris. I enjoy French literature and French history. So, I thought, “This is hard and interesting. It’s difficult for me to keep doing this.”
Back when people valued a little challenge. Well, I was looking into some of your earlier bylines at these larger legacy media outlets, and I was finding more arts writing than music writing.
EC: Yeah, I definitely switched to be more interested in arts writing. When I was in my freshman year of college, I took a course that was the best class I ever took. It was by Marvin Taylor, who used to run the Fales Library and Archives at NYU that has the Downtown Collection. The course was called “Punk to Postmodernism: The Downtown New York Scene.” We read Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, David Wojnarowicz. We looked at David’s art and all the downtown artists of that era, and I just felt like my little world that I grew up in in Pittsburgh exploded. Because I understood the world like, this is the way the world is, the little suburban plots…Not that growing up in Pittsburgh wasn’t kind of white trash, because it was, but I had this idea of what the world was, what writing was, and then you read Kathy Acker, or you read Dennis Cooper, and you’re like, “Oh, okay, these people are playing with language. They’re playing with what you can and can’t write about.” My world exploded, and that’s when I got interested in art.
You saw what art was actually capable of.
EC: Yes. My mom is an artist and did advertising, so she had me take classes at the Carnegie Museum. But that was like looking at Impressionism, like the Monet waterlilies. It wasn’t David Wojnarowicz’s photographic collages with men fucking each other and little pinpoint photographs. So, yeah, that’s when I got really interested in art. Through that class, I wrote a paper on David Wojnarowicz’s work. I remember talking to the professor, Marvin, and he said something to me like, “Have you ever thought about art writing?” And, to me, this wasn’t even a thing. I didn’t know it was a possibility. This was not a reality in Pittsburgh that I knew about. Like, we didn’t have Artforum delivered to my house, right? I just didn’t know that it was a thing. And I was like, “What? Okay,” and then kind of moved on. I didn’t think about it until years later, and I’m like, “Oh, you basically told me maybe you should do this.”
When did you actually venture into arts writing? How did you get that first byline?
EC: So, I fell into it a bit after graduating from grad school at NYU. I was looking for a job and Hyperallergic was looking for people, so I applied and started writing freelance for them. That was like 2011.
I noticed that your last stack of Hyperallergic bylines was published in 2013, which was the same year you launched Filthy Dreams. I figured there was a story there as to why you ultimately decided to go independent.
EC: Yeah, it was a few things. With Hyperallergic, there was a period where I tried to be a staff writer, and I was like, “This is not working.”
Why?
EC: Because they wanted me to write something like three or four articles a day, and I would be in office two or three times a week. They’d say, “Well, you could write it outside,” but essentially you’re sitting there doing this, right? And I’m pumping out bullshit that I’m not even proud of, and then I’m gonna have all this stuff on my byline that I’m embarrassed about. So we did a two week trial or something, and both me and the editor-in-chief were like, “Yeah, I don’t think this is working.” But I kept freelancing with them, and then they had an editor come in who I had some issues with.
I think what really started Filthy Dreams is I pitched an article in 2013 on Visual AIDS. They’re a nonprofit organization that started when a lot of people were dying from complications from AIDS and were leaving enormous amazing archives that their families just didn’t understand were valuable, and they were being thrown out. So Visual AIDS started as a group of artists being like, “We need to preserve this stuff.” It still exists, and they still do artwork and shows that relate to people who are living with AIDS or who have died. Anyway, they were having a 25th anniversary show, and I pitched [Hyperallergic] on it, and they were like, “I think we’ve already had too much about AIDS recently.” I was like, “Whoa. Okay, I need to have a place where I can write about whatever I want to write about, and I’m not beholden to some strange kind of quota of articles about HIV and AIDS.”
Yeah, that’s a problem. And I realized there was another Filthy Dreams co-founder I was not previously aware of…Matthew Marion Gray.
EC: He’s who probably urged me to do this. Going back to talking about why we’re here, Filthy Dreams was thought up originally as a bar. You know how you go to bars and you’re like, “I could do better than this?”
Yeah.
EC: So, Filthy Dreams was this imagined bar with my friend Matthew from grad school. Every time we’d be out somewhere, we would start imagining this bar we were going to start, and every idea we had got poured into this bar called Filthy Dreams. It would have a show on the hour, every hour, with lots of confetti and disco balls and Lynchian red curtains…And then I lowered my expectations and started a blog.
It is what it is. Sometimes you have to do it.
EC: Matthew goes as Marion on the site. He mostly posts our playlists, which I think are almost the most important thing we do on Filthy Dreams. He went to NYU with me in grad school, and then went to Indiana to teach high school. Now he’s in Rochester teaching college, so he doesn’t write that much.
There’s definitely an ongoing theme of gay bars and nightclubs in the world of Filthy Dreams. Your foray into exhibition curation has largely been centered around nightlife, too. I’m curious about your early nightlife experiences in New York, and if you see anything of real influence or interest happening right now.
EC: I don’t know about early experiences in New York, but I have formative experiences that definitely informed the Filthy Dreams aesthetic. There used to be a bar in the Financial District that closed a couple years ago called the Iron Horse. Matty and I always called it “Where Dreams Go to Die.” International Bar has a bit of an end of the world energy, but this really had it. The bartenders would dance on the bar to certain songs. There was a swing so you could get up on the bar with them, and they’d straddle you on the swing and pour shots into your mouth. Whenever Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” would come on the jukebox, the bartender would light the bar on fire. So, along with the swing on the bar, there were also poles on the bar, and then the dancers would all light the bar on fire with vodka. It was totally wild.
Sounds like Coyote Ugly!
EC: It was like Coyote Ugly but in the Financial District, so there were, like, executive assistants and chiffon shirts dancing on the stripper pole on the bar. One time, I was going up to the bar to get a drink, and there was a woman who was like, “Do you want some syrup?” And she took a bottle of maple syrup out of her purse and poured it on her hand.
As for nightlife now, there’s a really good young music scene in New York that I feel like doesn’t get enough attention. I think TV Eye is definitely one of the important venues in that. I think of bands like Genre is Death and SKORTS, which is another good young band. I think there’s a lot of young bands in New York that are up and coming now. I think that’s where the interesting nightlife is. There’s also Night Club 101. They had Voyeur, who I haven’t seen yet. I’m interested in them. I’d like to see them. I feel like the interesting nightlife is a lot of the live music.
An appreciation for the John Waters flavor of camp and trash culture is key to grasping the thrust and brilliance of Filthy Dreams. I noted Spike’s Summer ‘25 issue theme was VULGARITY, in which writer Dean Kissick wrote: “Culture has been cultivated and refined to the point of maddening blandness, and the Vulgar Image is a reaction against such tasteful mediocrity.” Does this resonate with you? I wanna hear your thoughts on the enduring relevance and value of camp, especially in the age of AI slop art.
EC: I haven’t read that issue, but it’s interesting to think about AI artist camp. I think it can be camp. Definitely. Matty, my Filthy Dreams cofounder, has been sending me Stephen Hawking doing Wrestlemania AI videos that I definitely think probably qualify. The enduring relevance of camp…there’s a lot that can be said about this. Camp certainly is relevant in both good ways and bad. I think camp is most relevant now with how Trump has used camp to get his way into the White House two times now. Both trash and camp. He’s harnessed that. I mean, his YMCA Village People dancing is camp, right? It’s camp. You can’t understand it as anything else other than that. He’s weaponized it, in a way. And I think even more than that, he’s weaponized John Waters’ trash culture, right? I mean, he’s the ultimate figure of Wrestlemania, McDonald’s-eating, garbage truck-driving trash culture.
And what is it about that that resonates so much with the average American?
EC: Well, it’s at the heart of everyone! I mean, isn’t that us? That’s the horror of Donald Trump. He’s like the Frankenstein’s monster of us.
He’s a mirror.
EC: He’s a mirror, yeah. He’s like the worst of us in a person. I think you can’t understand it without understanding that. Not that I’m a fan, by the way, but you have to understand how he’s a camp figure. I mean, there’s conservative camp, like Donald Trump and what I wrote about, the Charlie Kirk AI tributes. So there’s conservative camp, and then there’s queer-driven camp that John Waters did that we all know and love. There’s still that, but it’s also been weaponized in a way. In some ways, I think that’s almost what’s keeping it relevant. I’m not sure how I can understand how the two relate to one another, but I do think conservative camp has kind of been at the forefront for the last four years.
Well, the conservative camp is almost incidental, right?
EC: Sometimes I think they understand. George Santos understands. But sometimes they don’t understand. There’s naive camp and then there’s intentional camp.
Right, I don’t mean to underestimate them. Trump has certainly proven he can’t be underestimated. He’s definitely tapped into something.
EC: It’s hard to know how much of that is him and how much is calculated. But John Waters-style camp endures, too, in many different ways. I see John Waters camp in shows like The Idol, or Euphoria.
Definitely. Ok, let’s talk about your visit to the White House…
EC: Thankfully just in time! They’re knocking down some of the East Wing for the ballroom. He’s building this giant ballroom. Every time I read about the ballroom, the last song from The Shining, “Midnight, the Stars and You”, starts playing in my head…
Why did you go to the White House? And what was it like?
EC: I went because I wanted to know what Melania had done with the place. They started giving tours again after the Trumps came back in, and I was already going to D.C. because I was following Nick Cave, as I often do. So I was like, “Well, why not?” You have to go through your representative, so I had to write Dan Goldman, who I hate, by the way, but maybe a little bit less because he actually got me the tickets. I still don’t want to vote for him, but whatever.
*Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing” starts playing in the bar*
EC: First off, let me just say this is one of my favorite songs, and I love that they’re playing it here. So, to go back to the founding of Filthy Dreams, this song is actually formative to the idea of Filthy Dreams as a bar. We had an idea of an advertisement for the bar that would be like a Petri dish overflowing set to Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing.”
So, anyways, the White House. I was curious what Melania had done because we’ve all seen her iconic Christmas decorations, right? So, the greatest thing that happened to me going to the White House was that I was on the first tour that ever saw this, like, horrific painting that Trump put up of himself, which looked like he bought it at a flea market. It’s like a silkscreen—clearly printed, not painted—portrait of himself on the American flag. It looks like he’s in jail because of the stripes [over his face], and he wedged it between Hillary [Clinton] and Laura Bush. Hillary’s portrait was also bad, by the way, but not like this. The perspective was off, her head looked way too small. The painting was painted by MAGA Langelo. There’s a tiny little gift shop before you go into some of the rooms of the White House. [The portrait] was right outside of that, and the person working at the gift shop came around and was like, “You guys are the first group to see this. The president just put this up yesterday.”
What a privilege.
EC: It was fascinating. It was mostly MAGA people who were going through, along with some people who were probably just interested in touring the White House. But I also went to a MAGA rally when it was at Madison Square Garden. It was huge, and way too long. It was really boring. Because I was like, “I’m open.” I mean, not really, but I’m open enough. But when Trump came on, all these people left. I think they were trying to catch their trains. They saw enough of his speech, and then just went, “Well, we laid eyes on him. We’re gonna go.”
That doesn’t seem like a meaningful investment…
EC: I understood it, though. When you watch the rallies, people are often leaving. I’ve never had a desire to leave anywhere more than that. And it wasn’t just what he was saying, it was how he was saying it. He was so boring. My row was completely empty. I was in the nosebleed seats.
I’m glad someone’s doing this research.
EC: Well, it was free. It was at Madison Square Garden. Anybody could go. I didn’t have to sign up for anything, so I just went. I didn’t believe I was gonna do it until I got in that line and I’m like, “I guess I’m gonna do this.”
Politics really color the state of the art world. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this woke whiplash we’ve experienced. I think we can both agree that by the time [Dean] Kissick dropped “The Painted Protest” essay in Harper’s (on the overreach of identity politics in the art world) we were all on the same page.
EC: By the time he published that it was way too late.
Exactly, it was old news.
EC: It was old news. It was over.
And now we’re dealing with these real political consequences, like the NEA grant cuts. So, I wanted to hear your thoughts on politics bleeding into the art world.
EC: Yeah, it’s interesting. I couldn’t understand the people who were like, “Yes, finally, someone says something!” I’m like, “I think I’ve been saying this for years. I don’t think this is anything new. It’s just in Harper’s now.” And it came at an unfortunate time, after the [2024 presidential] election. It was like, this is over. We’re going to be wishing for identity politics.
I think we don’t know, at this point, how it’s actually going to shake out in the art world. But what they’re trying to do to the Smithsonian is criminal. I don’t know what the Trump administration is actually doing because they have a tendency to announce they’re going to do something and never follow through. Everything’s so haphazard and chaotic. But they wanted to review basically every single thing that the Smithsonian does, from its exhibition wall texts, to the exhibitions it puts on, to the permanent collections, to their education initiatives, to their grant applications. So they could possibly destroy it, right? And as much as I think there was a lot of identity politics overreach, where curating became about taking this demographic and that demographic, and this person says something interesting about this political thing, but the artwork is not actually that compelling…the backlash could be a whole lot worse. I think that’s the question. I don’t know what you end up with. A Thomas Kinkade retrospective? I mean, I’ll go and review that, but it’s a very real possibility. A MAGA Langelo retrospective? A Jon McNaughton? It’s a possibility.
Well, it’s clear that they’re aware of the influence of the art world.
EC: Yeah, it’s that obsession with DEI. And are some of those wall labels kind of absurd? Yes, but so what? You have people who didn’t used to be represented in these collections represented. And I love those Smithsonian D.C. museums because they’re all free.
It’s a weird tension point. We’ve got David Wojnarowicz at the Leslie Lohman Museum, Vaginal Davis at Moma PS1, and Giorno Poetry Systems recently hosted Ira Silverberg in a discussion about William S. Burroughs and John Giorno. The cultural relevance of LGBTQ filth elders remains intact. At the same time, Interview Mag [via poet Riley Mac] asks: “Why Are All the Lesbian Celebrities Straight Now?,” and lesbian twitter calls out Kim Kardashian’s pube panties, claiming stolen valor. In an age in which queerness has become commodified, where do you see it retaining or calling back its power? What does it mean that Filthy Dreams analyzes culture through a “queer lens”?
EC: I’m so glad you asked that. I’ve had a lot of feelings about that from when I started Filthy Dreams. In 2013, when I started, I talked to you about not having a place to write a review of the Visual AIDS show. It felt like there needed to be a place to have writing about queer art and queer culture. And then, through Filthy Dreams’ progression, I witnessed it become completely commodified, where a lot of writing about queer artwork became headlines, like, ‘This artist is dismantling this homo-normative whatever.’
Reductive.
EC: It became this reductive identity politics from Condé Nast. I wrote for them, so I can say that.
Say it.
EC: Condé Nast thought it was a good idea to have a queer magazine. So I’ve seen these shifts and changes, and I’ve had different feelings about what it means to write from a queer lens. At some point I’m like, “It’s whatever I say it’s gonna be, right?” Filthy Dreams has a queer perspective. That camp perspective is queer no matter what. But labeling it as queer for a period of time felt like, “I don’t even want to be a part of this because I don’t know what this means.” Because it’s become so gentrified and commodified by these larger business interests. But now? I don’t know. Maybe it means something different. I feel like we’re still in kind of a transitory phase. I don’t know how you feel.
Well, it’s interesting. One thing that helped me kind of get back to baseline was reading Genesis P-Orridge’s final interview. I know you also interviewed them shortly before they passed. I resonated with this idea of identifying with queerness because it’s a form of “short-circuiting control” (per William S. Burroughs), which, I understand, has also been degraded by this [corporate] commodification…
EC: Gen can never be completely commodified.
No, Gen can’t be commodified. I understand we’ve taken the postmodernist deconstruction of culture, gender, etcetera to an extreme, to the point where it’s hard to find a unified sense of reality. I understand there are different arguments to be made, but when it comes back to basics, I think there’s still power in this idea of short-circuiting control.
EC: I agree with that, yeah. And I think increasingly, right, because as it dips out of popularity, which I think it’s starting to now, then it becomes important again.
Right, it seems to me that the media is much more hyper-fixated on heterosexuality lately. I’m seeing articles saying that men and women increasingly don’t know how to communicate with each other, like we’re politically divided and both kind of incels in our own sectors gooning, men with their porn and women with their fantasy erotica. The concern has shifted to the reality of heterosexuality failing over and over again in new, novel ways.
EC: That’s kind of amazing, though. Talking about control and AI, I feel like that’s kind of what they want. Now OpenAI is doing porn. They want everybody gooning, off in their own apartments, nobody talking to one another.
The isolationist objective, yeah. To create subjects that are more susceptible to control.
EC: Yeah, because I think they’re also going to start doing ads. So they can have your AI girlfriend telling you, like, “Why don’t you buy this from Walmart?”
That’s so fucking scary.
EC: We live in hell, as Tim Dillon says.
He’s almost always right.
EC: I know. Sometimes, it’s really creepy, but I’ll say things to my parents, who also love Tim Dillon, and they’re like, “You know Tim said that.” And I’m like, “I know.” I’ll rant and he’ll rant the same rant. We’re on the same wavelength. We see it. We see what’s going on.
…TO BE CONTINUED. SUBSCRIBE FOR NEXT WEEK’S INSTALLMENT OF ROT.
Amazing work! Love this interview. Really interested in the discourse around queer commodification and gender towards the end of this one. Indeed, Tim Dillon is almost always right! Hahaha. Looking forward to reading the next instalment.
perf! Yay Emily! ... and I can almost literally hear you say “Oh shit!,”