Subculture Vulture: A Memoir in Six ScenesĀ - Street Smart
Contributor(s):Ā Kasher, MosheĀ (Author)
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Publication Date: Ā January 30, 2024
Format:Ā Hardcover
"Moshe Kasher has the rare gift to simultaneously celebrate a community while also making fun of it. His writing succinctly captures the insanity, the joy, the ridiculousness, and the radical act of fully embracing these worlds."--Nick Kroll
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After bottoming out, being institutionalized, and getting sober all by the tender age of fifteen, Moshe Kasher found himself asking: "What's next?"Ā Over the ensuing decades, he discovered the answer: a lot.
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There was his time as a boy-king of Alcoholics Anonymous, a kind of pubescent proselytizer for other teens getting and staying sober. He was a rave promoter turned DJ turned sober ecstasy dealer in San Francisco's techno warehouse party scene of the 1990s. For fifteen years he worked as a psychedelic security guard at Burning Man, fishing hippies out of hidden chambers they'd constructed to try to sneak into the event. As a child of deaf parents, Kasher became deeply immersed in deaf culture and sign language interpretation, translating everything from end-of-life care to horny deaf clients' attempts to hire sex workers. He reconnects and tries to make peace with his ultra-Hasidic Jewish upbringing after the death of his father before finally settling into the comedy scene where he now makes his living.
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Each of these scenes gets a gonzo historiographical rundown before Kasher enters the narrative and tells the story of the lives he has spent careening from one to the next.Ā A razor-sharp, gut-wrenchingly funny, and surprisingly moving tour of some of the most wildly distinct subcultures a person can experience,Ā Subculture VultureĀ deftly weaves together memoir and propulsive cultural history. It's a story of finding your people, over and over again, in different settings, and of knowing without a doubt that wherever you are is where you're supposed to be.
