Infernal Hails to Saint Vitus Bar
2011-2024
This week, after a long struggle with the Department of Buildings, Brooklyn metal bar Saint Vitus announced that it was closing its doors for good. This, as any discerning local or semi-itinerant punk band will tell you, is genuinely bad news. Saint Vitus was a fixture, not just of Brooklyn's heavy music scene, but of the whole northeastern US circuit. I've seen far too many bands in that room to count, and played there frequently, even before I moved to New York.
One of the dumbest shows that Archagathus ever played was at Saint Vitus, with our haggard tutors in Agathocles. Dan was in rough shape and managed to fall through every station of the borrowed equipment; taking out the guitar and bass rigs separately, and eventually collapsing backwards through the drum kit. We flubbed that one, but played great shows there too, and anytime a venue lasts for long enough to host your highs and lows, it’s sure to feel like home.
Greenpoint has changed a lot since I lived in Brooklyn, and that’s not so long ago. Little Poland was already occupied by yuppie run-off from the post-Vice Williamsburg ten years ago, and since 2020 it grows colder and younger still. But the shuttering of Vitus feels like a definitive development in its decline—that moment when the neighbourly alternative types who have nestled into crevices of an existing system of life are themselves expelled, and even the memory of a city in transition is erased. Besides, Vitus was never obtrusive at street level; if you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd walk right past its black painted door.
Beyond the local wounding, this is only the most recent instalment in a long string of classic venue closures across the continent, where building code furnishes a pretence for city bureaucrats, private developers, and fascist trolls to move along inconvenient or unprofitable expressions of culture. In 2016, Burnt Ramen in Richmond fell casualty to the city’s prejudicial scrutiny, capitalizing on the tragedy of the Ghost Ship fire to crack down on semi-legal and resilient alternative infrastructure. Last year, Vancouver's longstanding Black Lab was forced to close its doors due to arcane zoning regulations; and the loss of this key venue can't be a coincidence amid the city's longer strategy to break apart the collective life of the Downtown Eastside; a crackdown most hatefully expressed in the recent charges against the Drug User Liberation Front.
These examples may seem far more drastic in their motivation at a glance; but together they speak to a pattern of abused bureaucracy and backwards priorities that quite literally pits music and its social scenery against the neoliberal city and its investors. Saint Vitus was forced to close its doors mid-show on a Friday night in February, when the Department of Buildings burst in to investigate a series of targeted complaints. Gigs were scattered and rescheduled, but we all hoped for the best. Officially, the venue was accused of running an “illegal eating and drinking establishment” in a space zoned for “a commercial store and for the storage of machinery”—but there’s a longer story behind the instigation of this scrutiny.
As reported by the Gothamist, in May and June of 2023, the city received more than a dozen complaints within days of each other, almost certainly written by the same person. At the time of the closure, and with minimal effort, the scene turned up strong evidence of a lonely vendetta against the venue by one “Jack Grindstone,” whose sole pleasure seems to be the hounding of “woke” nightlife. In language close to that of the complaints, a series of since-deleted posts within days of the initial closure ranted against the venue. "I've complained about this several times for months, and months, and months," @JGrindstone666 tweeted. "I'm afraid of them monopolizing the metal scene in NYC and forcing more and more of their liberal bullshit agenda on all of us." At a distance, it looks as if Vitus made an enemy with too much time on their hands, from somewhere along the anti-mask-to-fascist-shitheel pipeline. This is a possibility at the best of times, and a real occupational hazard of booking metal, but today the whole of extreme music in the US is worse off for an illiberal NIMBY's busy fingers.
Infernal hails to all those who made Vitus all the things it was. In club years, thirteen doesn't sound so unlucky.
MAGA WITHOUT MASKS: ON TRUMP WITH MUSK
For sheer morbidity, I wrote about the Donald Trump-Elon Musk conversation that took place on X last week, and the significance of the Silicon Valley-MAGA consilience for US imperialism:
For all their differences in style, what is the significance of Elon Musk to Donald Trump, and vice versa? As an alignment of class fractions, their alliance recapitulates the tension between technocratic futurism and unfounded nostalgia that shapes the new right. Naturally, the populist operators of Trump’s appeal sound unpersuasive coming from the likes of Musk or Thiel; but then they hardly suit Trump’s dumpy mogul persona either. In present company, Musk represents a final push towards the full fascisization of MAGA; not only in his personal enthusiasms, but insofar as he is himself the proper recipient and beneficiary of its policies and vision.
