Merlin Bronques and the Beautiful Wrecks

Merlin Bronques turned a camera and a theory—that the best parties need documentation, and that documentation changes what a party becomes—into a minor institution. His site LastNightsParty became a mythology of the New York scene, and the feedback loop it created spread well beyond Brooklyn: suddenly every third-rate photographer with a flash was trying to manufacture that same energy, and parties got louder, more performed, more consciously aimed at the possibility of ending up online.

The photographs made it to print in 2006, a book worth tracking down. Now Bronques has moved into video with LastNightsParty.tv—the first installment is called "Ruff Night," and it’s exactly what you’d expect: puking models, wrecked junkies, rich hip-hop kids who think they’re downtown. Which is to say it’s great.

He’s part of why I ended up creating Sina, the character at the center of this journal’s ongoing serial. That New York underground mythology—nights that are genuinely destructive and genuinely alive at the same time—fed directly into her world. Meanwhile I’m sitting in Berlin, which is clean and well-lit and completely harmless, watching vomiting models on a screen with popcorn and a Coke. Not a bad life. Just not quite the one Merlin’s shooting.