Jake Sillen

Jake Sillen on The Lady Gaga Monster Ball Philadelphia 2010 Recording, Live Theatre, Undercover Billionaire S2, and more.

March 29, 2023

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Jake Sillen is a New York City-based small business owner, DJ, party promoter, record label founder, artist manager, producer, memer extraordinaire, podcast host, and… well, yeah, what doesn't Jake do? She’s become embedded in the fabric of the city's post-pandemic nightlife scene with their legendary night club Rash, which is currently being rebuilt after an arson attack last year, and the epic Club Cringe party series. Over the last year she’s been executive producing the debut Angel Money mixtape and "creating global LGBTQIA+ panic" on the Seeking Derangements Podcast with Ben Mora and Hesse Deni. You also have Jake to thank for starting the OG "incellectuals" page in 2020 which went on to inspire thousands of niche "cellectual" offshoots in it's wake. Lucky for us, Jake is here to tell us what she’s been into.

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Live Theatre

I’m trying to bring theatre back to the city! Back in January Sam Rolfes and I directed a huge one-night-only musical show called Diskokina, and I’m currently developing the Club Cringe showcase for festivals. As a result, theatre is seeping into everything else I’m doing right now. I’ve been spending a bunch of time in the Theatre archives up on 64th st, where you can watch the city’s archive of musicals and plays dating back over 50 years - but the catch is you can only view each production once in your lifetime. It’s so depressing that the only shows we see talked about online is shit like Hamilton. Plays used to be such a big part of New York’s cultural export and it feels like it’s kind of been handed off to the tourists. I think performers in general play it very safe and calculated these days, which is why I’m drawn to musicians who get up there and present a whole idea in their live shows. Frost Children and Club Eat come to mind immediately. It’s vulnerable and cringe to get up on stage and start sharing things that used to be just in your notes app, to a whole room full of people. I guess that’s where the name Club Cringe comes from. It’s more about the risk of performing something big and high concept and being okay with potentially seeing it flop or be ill-recieved, “coming off cringe” than it is about the work actually being intentionally cringey.

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Kagami Live @ WIRE04 JAPAN

One of my favorite DJ/producers ever, who tragically died in 2010. His sound is still so fresh today and this is probably his best recorded set. The disco house coming out of Japan from that era (Frogman Records, Reel Musiq) is criminally overlooked and I think it’s so much more fun and sonically interesting than the French Touch + Italo Disco vibe everybody’s been getting back into lately. If I could go back in time to see one show it would probably be this one. When he gets out of the booth to go play live electric guitar (around 11min in) over the loop I get chills. Very few people are giving this these days!

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Vampire Survivors

If you’ve been living under a rock, let me tell you. This is probably the best game released last year and it’s only $3. My business partners would be horrified to learn how many hundreds of hours I’ve given to this game. After a long day on set, there’s nothing better than posting up horizontal for a few half hour runs through the Inlaid Library while you listen to the new Lana album.

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Deeply Unwell Podcast

Probably the funniest two girls on the planet. They have me waiting by my inbox for each new drop. Anyone reading this should subscribe to their patreon immediately.

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Eyeliner Stamps

These are my weekday secret. Search eyeliner wing stamp on Amazon, they’re pretty much all the same. It’s such an amazing instant little wing that you can never get wrong. Perfect for days when you’re not putting on anything but foundation, or if you’re like me and you put off learning how to do a clean wing into your mid 20s. The only flaw is I literally want a 30 pack of these with different tips and lengths and one with little artwork details in the stamp. It would be so easy. This space (beauty shortcuts) is such a huge market gap, if anyone out there wants to start a company and you have the manufacturing plug hit me up - we could be printing money.

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Undercover Billionaire (Season 2)

My all time favorite show of the last few years. I’m halfway through a podcast recap series (on Seeking Derangements with Ben Mora & Hesse Deni, the first few episodes are free and the rest are on patreon). Here’s the elevator pitch: Three self-made billionaires are dropped in small American cities with fake identities and none of their possessions or contacts. With only a truck, a smartphone and $100 in their pocket, can they prove the American dream is still alive by starting businesses that reach a 1 Million dollar valuation in just three months??Ever since becoming a business owner I’ve done a deep dive into business media like this because it really gamifies life into a speedrun where now the variables and game elements are people and products and prices and logistics systems. It’s like applying D&D game theory to all of the connected economies in a city, which sounds stupid except they’re kind of right. Real life is just like that!

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Lady Gaga Monster Ball Philadelphia 2010 recording

I’m shocked whenever I hear that someone hasn’t watched the Monster Ball. It’s probably the best touring show ever produced. She toured it around the world for two years without stopping. It’s a perfect spectacle of camp, raw talent, and high budget theater. Most people go for the HBO Madison Square Garden filming but personally I prefer another version that’s free on YouTube. Philly, shot right after her five-night Madison Square Garden stint, is Gaga at her loosest. The wigs are unbrushed. The muscle relaxers are flowing. There’s a branded Virgin Mobile part where she calls a fan on a flip phone. She calls herself a tranny and she fucks up some of her keytar solos, but it’s impossible to look away. It’s a masterpiece of improvisation and I’ll take it over the squeaky clean HBO version anyday

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Pannenkoek12’s 2016 masterpiece “Watch for Rolling Rocks 0.5 A Presses (Commentated)”

Speedrunning, if you don’t know, is a community that challenges each other to get to the endpoint of any video game as fast as possible, ignoring the actual content of the game often through glitches and exploits. As my good friend DJ Wallh4x once said, at its purest, it turns each title into a game of chess. Meaning that, it’s inner workings have been so poured over that every possible action has been mapped out into a matrix and optimized, so the closer a record holder gets to the absolute purest optimization, it starts to become years between any signs of progress. Seven years later, this video is still like a comfort stim blanket for me. It’s a breakdown of speedrun techniques used by pros and TAS in a specific world level of Mario 64 but it’s such a beautiful illustration of complex techniques used to an end that so many people would call pointless. I kind of think of it like that Malcom Gladwell 10,000 hours thing - and it’s so cool to think that that applies to anything, not just more conventional skills and trades. It’s meditative, genius, and weirdly anarchistic. And keep in mind this is just one level of one game. It’s art. I hope to make something as beautiful as this one day. If I try to explain it any more here I’ll sound insane so just watch it for yourself.

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Jake Sillen

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