"I’m told Allen was studiously avoided."
Interiors
During a launch party for a kink app-funded literary magazine — yes, you read that right — Gen Z and Millennial guests were unnerved when their Boomer host's most notorious friends arrived.
In a New York Times scene report, the launch party for Feeld's new lit mag, fittingly titled "A Fucking Magazine" or AFM for short, seemed to be a fascinating meetup between the literati's old guard and its new, nonmonogamous younger generation — right up until Woody Allen and his former-adopted-daughter-turned wife Soon-Yi Previn showed up.
Hosted by essay writer Daphne Merkin at her roomy Manhattan apartment, the scenario could well have been something out of a new Allen film had the 2017 #MeToo movement not resurfaced allegations of sexual abuse against him made by another of his adopted children, Dylan Farrow.
"Feeld team members looked on a bit anxiously," writer Alex Vadukul recounted, "as the host chatted with them in a corner."
Indeed, the 88-year-old "Annie Hall" director himself remarked at how familiar the scene felt to him.
"I’d go to those parties, always held by writers like Norman Mailer or George Plimpton," Allen told the NYT. "You’d stand around talking with Susan Sontag or Dwight Macdonald. It was like how this is tonight."
It's hard to imagine who in that era, though, would have made guests as apprehensive as this ill-famed auteur.
New York Stories
Notably, the paper of record did not interview any of the younger writers who attended the AFM launch party at Merkin's place about the Allen of it all — but that doesn't mean folks weren't talking about it.
As The Cut noted in its own scene report from the magazine's larger launch party, which was held the following day at a dance club across from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, mention of the infamous attendees made its way to the profile's writer.
"I’m told Allen was studiously avoided," columnist Bindu Bansinath remarked in a parenthetical.
While we're used to people who are nearly universally loathed rubbing shoulders with Silicon Valley's hoi polloi, hearing about such a thing happening in the world of dating apps and literary magazines feels a little more discordant.
One thing, however, is for sure: if Allen or Previn are on Feeld, they would have to do so without identifying photos — because otherwise, the rest of NYC's nonmonogamous and kink crowd would be in an uproar.
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